On first impression, ELAN looks very promising for our needs; so thanks for your efforts! However, there are severe performance issues when using the software, which even lead to a crash (freeze) of the software.
BACKGROUND: For a research project, we need to annotate human activities in sensor data. In our setting, we use several cameras to monitor the scene from different angles. So the aim was to import up to four camera views into ELAN for guiding the annotation process.
PROBLEM: We did tests with i5 and i7 processors on both Windows 8 and Windows 10. In all cases, the software becomes laggy once we import more than one Full HD video into the software. Even two videos can cause the software to freeze. More than two videos definitely crash the software
We would appreciate any form of support to solve the issue. It is quite urgent, as our experiments will start in a few days.
Yes, that kind of setup is and will be problematic.
I could reproduce freezes with four Full HD videos and in my case there were some OutOfMemoryError messages in the log file after a (forced) exit of ELAN.
So, one thing you could try is increase the available memory for ELAN, as follows:
in the ELAN install folder there is a file ELAN.lax which can be opened in a text editor. Somewhere in that file there is a line starting with lax.nl.java.option.java.heap.size.max
followed by a number of bytes. The comment says it is 256Mb but this is incorrect, the actual value is 1024Mb (1 GiB). You could e.g. double the value, save the file and launch ELAN again to see if this makes any difference.
Even when ELAN does not freeze, responsiveness might still be problematic. I don’t know what can be done about that. If the four videos are always used “attached”, so inside the ELAN window, the question arises whether it wouldn’t be acceptable to downsize the videos to e.g. 720p (but I understand this is not the preferred approach).
