FAQ

The most frequently asked questions:

What should I do, if there is a problem ...

Always make sure to use the latest version available for your macOS. Tell an issue as detailed as possible.
Crashes are rare. Most of them are related to incompatible media. This can be solved by exporting the media to compliant media before use.
If a crash should happen, please use our crash report feature, enter a description and your email, so that we can give support.
Please note: Crash reports without your email address are recognized, but not actively supported.

Will the tools be updated to 64 bit?

Yes. Our major tools are already available for 64 bit as a preview. The major change is a complete replacement of Apple's media framework. Since short Apple displays an alert, when a 32 bit app is opened the first time in MacOS 10.13.4. This can safely be ignored.
Our apps continue to work on MacOS High Sierra (MacOS 10.13) and MacOS Mojave (MacOS 10.14).
We are still waiting for some features to come to Apple's new media framework.
Apple's own professional tool "Apple Compressor" also remained for long 32 bit for similar reasons, but Apple decided to exclude "Apple Compressor" from this alert display.

Annotation Edit 1.9.x.x does not open any more?

Please note: Annotation Edit 1.9.x.x and many other 32 bit apps that use audio may not open any more, if a recent version of iTunes or "iTunes Sync Update" for iPhone was installed.

In this case we recommend to use our 64 bit version for macOS Catalina instead.
The 64 bit version for macOS Catalina also works on older 64 bit versions of macOS. No need to update to macOS Catalina, but it is required for macOS Catalina. This issue and an alternative solution is described here at Apple.

The updater displays a locked volume error?

This occurs if you want to update an app that not has left quarantine from Apple Gatekeeper. Just move the apps from the download folder before opening.
Please take the update info as a hint to download the full update package from our site. The complete package includes all updated tools and documents.

DLP Cinema files don't work with DaVinci Resolve EasyDCP plugin?

If you see the message "Recording failed" in DaVinci Resolve on EasyDCP export, in almost all cases the font as named in the .xml or the images are not found.
The supplemental files have to reside in the same folder as the DLP Cinema .xml. The font file size was limited to 640kb in early DLP specification.
You may want to choose Interop packaging in DaVinci Resolve and DC Distribution Master "No" and DC Subtitle Version 1.0 in DLP Cinema export.

The interface looks strange on macOS 10.12.2?

Yes. Apple changed the handling of .psd with alpha interface elements. Update to version 1.9.87 on macOS 10.12.2 or later.

Can I use MXF, IMX, ProRes (export) etc.?

Yes, if you did install at least Apple Compressor 4. For ProRes (export) or IMX Apple Compressor 3 is sufficient.

Final Cut Pro X 10.0.x cannot import .fcpxml?

Apple did change the .fcpxml to version 1.3 for Final Cut Pro X 10.1.x.
.fcpxml vs. 1.3 or later is not compatible with Final Cut Pro X 10.0.x.

Final Cut Pro X Export

Images (NLE,DCP) export can create images and .fcpxml for Final Cut Pro X.
Please note: Final Cut Pro X 10.0.2 and lower require full-frame images.
Additionally you can exchange title effects. To specify the title effect, you create a single title .fcpxml file and import it into our plugin.
Early Annotation Edit 1.9.15.x versions had a versioning issue. Please download Annotation Edit again if you need FCP X image export.

Is Adobe Premiere / After Effects etc. supported?

Yes. There are two options offered by the Image Export plugin: FCP XML and QuickTime Movie.
1. Export to Final Cut XML using TIFF with alpha (Adobe tools seem to prefer TIFF).
After Effects users may try the free Automatic Duck AE Import plugin to import the Final Cut XML.
Some other tools may require full frame images.
2. Export as lossless QuickTime movie from Images (NLE, DCP) export.
The movie is surprisingly small in file size and will work with all NLE and postproduction tools (incl. DaVinci Resolve 8.x, Avid Media Composer etc.). Using a movie also avoids massive amounts of subtitle assets.
Update:
Annotation Edit now can import and export Essential Graphics text for Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017.1.2 or newer with Final Cut XML.

The QuickTime Preview does not work?

Usage of Quicktime Text and old SMIL and is not possible with QuickTime Player X.

My carriage returns are gone after import from FCP XML?

Important: Yes. Final Cut 7.0.2 XML export omits all carriage returns in all text generators - including built-in. Carriage returns are replaced by a blank space.
Update: Final Cut 7.0.3, part of the latest Pro Applications Support update, works fine again.

How to import Final Cut clip markers?

In the Import/Export preferences you can select your preferred xml type. Since markers are not necessarily subtitles, you need to tell Annotation Edit to look for clip markers.

Send to Final Cut does not work?

You need to save your Final Cut project once before you can send subtitle tracks.

The license file does not work?

Some webmail programs change the file extension of the license file to ".xml" or ".mvtl.xml". Please change it to .mvtl in the Finder file info.
Starting with version 1.8.8.4 Annotation Edit will detect it for you.

NLE movies from BDN plugin do not work in Final Cut?

Yes. For FCP they need to be exported with e.g. 32 bit animation codec first. On the Mac ProRes 4444 is recommended.

The waveform is not visible?

This happens with muxed MPEG-1/2 or with some 3rd party audio-drivers. In case of a misbehaving audio-driver use the built-in instead.

Export to QuickTime movie?

Annotation Edit saves reference movies for speed and disk space. If the result is pleasing, save the movie as self-contained for deployment. The first release version of Annotation Edit 1.8.5 had an error, that was fixed 1 day later.

Subtitles appear very pixelated in DVD Studio Pro?

Yes. The preview in DVD Studio Pro does not display transparency levels. Transparency levels are required for a more smooth appearance later on DVD. You need to compile a DVD to test and approve the subtitle text quality.

After import to Final Cut Pro the time-line is empty?

The Final Cut time-line starts at frame zero. Offsets are handled separately. If you do not define the track offset in Annotation Edit, but just hand over imported time-code with 10 h offset or you shift the time-code by e.g. 10h, the first subtitle will be beyond the value that the Final Cut time-line can handle.

Final Cut asks for a transformation file when opening the XML?

Yes. This happens when you open a Final Cut XML file like an asset. You should import the XML file instead, or you right click in the file browser and choose "Import XML".

My Shuttle Express sometimes does not work?

Yes this can happen. The jog function is set up to work either with a standard trackpad or Shuttle Express. This implies that you scroll thru the timeline. Scrolling on Mac OS X 10.4/5 requires the mouse cursor over the active window. Apple announced to remove this shortcoming.

Carriage returns are gone in Final Cut Pro?

No. All carriage returns are exported fine. Soft line wraps should be converted to hard wraps before export. We believe it is easier to work with text when Annotation Edit does not add carriage returns automatically without being asked.

Closed captions do not export from Final Cut Pro 7 ?

The most common issue is the offset. Different to DVD Studio Pro or Compressor you should export SCC for FCP zero based and ignore the offset of the FCP timeline. FCP handles timeline offset quite similar to Annotation Edit as sequence attribute.

Is NetBlender doStudio - 8-bit alpha supported?

Yes. NetBlender doStudio 1.7 is compliant with Annotation Edit 8 bit alpha png. Earlier versions could require 1 bit transparency for a safe compile.

Does Annotation Edit support arabic/hebrew subtitles?

Yes. Arabic or hebrew subtitles created in Annotation Edit work for DVD SP, FCP and Blu-Ray, EBU STL and QuickTime.
Please note:
Subtitles imported from Windows files may need special treatment. For Blu-Ray or approval you may have to advise Annotation Edit to render text in "Left to right" mode. Yes it is surprising!

Should I render BDN Blu-Ray full frame images?

No. Cropped mages are vastly faster to render and compile. The full frame option is added for creation of approval images only. Or if your client demands it.
For Adobe Photoshop export to 32-bit alpha. Adobe does not support 8-but alpha png.

How can I create closed captions for broadcast with Final Cut Pro?

That depends. If your broadcaster accepts closed caption data written into an EIA 708 stream by Apple Compressor an affordable easy to use solution is found. But EIA 708 is is still new and confusion needs time to settle.
Update: Clients often demand closed captions printed tto tape. In this case you can use Final Cut 7 to add the closed captions from SCC file or QuickTime movie with closed captions and play out to SD and HD broadcast tape.
Standard NTSC EIA 608 line 21 closed captions can be created in older FCP with image overlays. There are 3rd party software tools that offer CC image rendering, for play-out you will have to tune your hardware/software setup. Otherwise the CC data may not survive.
Another option is to feed closed captions live into the video stream. This requires specialized hardware. New systems are being developed that support either standard.

After linking a video all time codes suddenly change?

Yes, if the video has a time-code track and you did set "Use native timecode" in the preferences. This is Annotation Edit's default way to display the native time-code offset of the video.
If you know the target video has an offset and your video misses a time-code track, you can assign the track offset in the processing pane. All non-web exports will export this offset accordingly.
You may ask, the file I did import has already the correct offset, why does it change? The answer is simple. Most file formats do not declare an offset as some videos do. All professional subtitle applications offer means solve this issue.
For Annotation Edit the current way is detecting the time-code offset, resetting it to zero and then assigning the offset as a track offset. It is done with a few clicks.

Avid SubCap STL export is an invalid file?

Yes. STL files exported from Avid Media Composer SubCap are not standard conform and have to be rejected. Required information is missing. Use Avid DS file format instead.

I think I found an error in the program

Please do not hesitate to send us a mail with a short description. If there is an error, it will de fixed shortly. This will help you and all other users. Sometimes feature updates may include errors that survived the test phase. They will be corrected immediately. Version 1.8.6 suffered from a deeply corrupted interface file, please download it again.

Other FAQ

German version only: Fehlermeldung bei Import von Stapelisten in FCP 6.x.x

Die deutsche Lokalisierung von FCP 6.x.x hat einen Fehler, der den Import von deutschen Stapellisten generiert mit FCP 4/5 oder Annotation Edit behindert. Lösung: Entweder nur mit englischen Stapellisten arbeiten oder mit Textedit im Tabellenkopf den grammatikalisch korrekten Term "Medienende" gegen "Medien-Ende" austauschen.

Annotation Edit did crash?

Crashes are rare. To gather information about crash issues, we did add a crash reporter. Please add some non-technical info e.g. what you did before the crash, and your email address for requests from us.
Most of known crashes are related to system components like QuickTime or file access, remaining issues are analyzed and solved if they can be reproduced.

Is Annotation Edit compatible with QuickTime 7.5

Annotation Edit works well with QuickTime 7.5 . But some third party QuickTime components show problems (Perian, FLV, etc). As a result the waveform may be created a bit slower or not at all.

The text overlay sometimes flickers in Annotation Edit?

Yes. Take it as a warning that your chosen font cannot represent all characters. To be safe you may consider to change the font for all exports as well. In most cases switching to Arial Unicode MS will solve unicode font problems.

Do I need a license to use the Annotation Edit FCP import plugin?

No. The Final Cut Pro plugin is basically free. But for best workflow Annotation Edit will give you the additional comfort you might miss otherwise.

Can I use Final Cut Express HD with Annotation Edit?

Yes. It works just fine. Export to Final Cut Pro. Put our subtitle plugin in /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins.
Start Final Cut Express HD and add the exported file to the project browser. A new sequence with editable subtitles will be created for you.
Update: Final Cut Express has short comings with special characters in track names. You will have to use standard latin characters instead.

STL import does not work in DVDStudioPro 3 ?

If your subtitle contains unicode characters , you will have to use the "Export to RTF" option in the DVDStudio export plugin. DVD Studio Pro 4 accepts unicode files directly. In any case unicode characters (like music symbol) must be included in the selected font to display properly.

QuickTime 7.4 / Perian subtitles do not work?

You should update to the Perian 1.1. For QuickTime 7.5 there is no Perian update available yet.
Also QuickTime 7.4 did break "Export as subtitled QuickTime movie" on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, use the newer "Export as QuickTime movie" instead. If you need multi-track subtitles an interim workaround has been prepared.

SCC Positions are different on import and export?

Yes. Due to the different layout models of Annotation Edit and SCC exporting to SCC can be handled without any loss, but import can only be mapped to come close.

Is Annotation Edit really compatible with Leopard?

Yes almost. Leopard will bring features, that are Leopard-only. For now the Leopard version a little behind Tiger: Export to subtitled movie is disabled and partially replaced by export to QuickTime reference movie.

What video formats do you recommend for use with Annotation Edit?

For highest frame accuracy any format is recommended, that sets every frame as a key frame, such as DV, Prores HD, Pixlet, Apple Intermediate, Photo JPEG. Any heavily compressed format with wide key frame settings will be less useful. In most cases scrubbing is limited. This is especially true for H.264, Sorenson and MPEG-2.
Scrubbing forward is ok in most cases, but backward scrubbing may not work as expected. There is a bug in the Apple QuickTime 7.1. H.264 encoder/decoder, that may even crash the application when scrubbing backwards.
This bug is apparent in all QuickTime applications that offer scrubbing with play backward, including Apple QuickTime Player (Jog shuttle).
So if you compress your movie with H.264 we strongly advise you to check the "Key Frames: All" option for smooth and reliable work.
Turning off scrubbing at all for certain formats would be the only fix on our side.
Processing the waveform of avi/divx/xvid files may take significantly longer, as these files require pre-processing by a 3rd party component (e.g. Perian), scrubbing backwards with audio is currently not possible with the Perian ac3 decoder.

Update:
QuickTime 7.2 fixes the H.264 bug mentioned above.

The application update function shows an error?

There was an error on the appcast server. This is fixed.

Important: QuickTime 7.2 iLife compatibilty update

The latest QuickTime iLife compatibilty update did not ask for a restart. Although Apple did forget, it is needed though. Annotation Edit and several other applications may show irregular behaviour if no restart was done.

QuickTime does not open the scc file?

There are two reasons.
1. You did not restart QuickTime Player after installing the ClosedCaptionImporter.component,
2. You have too short captions. Please remember: captions are slow, give them at least 2 seconds playtime. Annotation Edits warns you, if captions are too short, the gray bar beneath the duration display turns blue.

The Apple closed caption component shows wrong umlauts?

Yes. It is just a developer sample. Annotation Edit exports western european umlauts as SCC allows, it will work fine in Compressor or DVD Studio Pro.

Why don´t you support file format XXX

Because we do not support it now. We try any feature we offer to be state of the art or better. Just supporting some file format as well is not on our timetable. If demand is high we will support those formats with high priority. Knock on wood.

How to set up a jog shuttle with Contour Design Shuttle Pro/Express

Important Note On latest Leopard using ContourDesign Shuttle is compromised. The fix is immediately available now.
As importing shuttle settings sometimes seems to be not that easy or you want to set it up for yourself.
Outer Wheel
Shuttle Zone 0 :
Computer response - Type Keystroke : Cmd-K
Shuttle Zone (all other zones) :
Computer Response - Scroll Left or Scroll Right
Scroll Amount - 1 to 9 lines
Inner Wheel
Turn Jog Left :
Computer Response - Type Keystroke : Cmd-J
Turn Jog Right :
Computer Response - Type Keystroke : Cmd-L

QuickTime text or QuickTime preview are not correct.

There are 3 possible reasons:
1 You imported a file that has continuity problems. As QuickTime in most cases has a timebase of 600 and subtitle formats often use the video timebase there is an accuracy problem- A quick fix is to select all entries and press the minimum gap button.
2. You joined tracks. You might continue as in case 1. But you should survey cardinal overlaps before.
3. You entered non latin track or author information. Unicode is supported well for subtitles, but not for QuickTime metadata.

Since QuickTime 7.2 exporting to self-contained movies works different?

Yes. If you do own QuickTime Pro, you can save new movie at any place you like. If you have not bought QuickTime Pro, the easiest way to get the known functionality back, is to exchange QuickTime Player 7.2 with QuickTime Player 7.1.6 or earlier. A tool named "Pacifist" and the still offered QuickTime 7.1.6 download from Apple will help not having to reinstall QuickTime. We are watching this issue, but will wait for the next updates to come, before offering application changes. Switching back to QuickTime Player 7.1.6 is painless.
QuickTime 7.1.6

How to export mp3 from QuickTime movies

Use the lame.component for Quicktime available here: Lame encoder project page.
Older versions of iTunes (5) also can export movies to mp3.

Why do you use a separate file for audio spotting?

Because doing it this way is fast, efficient and allows audio preprocessing without crippling the sound you hear from your current media file. An instant audio spotting, limiting the audio spotting quality only to the measures given by your file is included in the shipping beta. This feature will supersede the Audio Spotting plugin within short. Any file aac/sd2/mov/aiff/wav etc can be taken as source. To assign the Quick Spotting to your project, just drag and drop it in.

Why is it not possible to export the preview movie with QuickTime Player?

The preview movie is actually a smil project. Apple's smil renderer does not work well when when exporting smil projects.
You should export to QuickTime reference movie with Annotation Edit instead. This movie can be rendered to any format supported by QuickTime. We use smil because it is fast, human readable, reusable and w3c standard. A smil project is added to version 1.2.

How can I use Microsoft Word to edit your "RTF with Links" format?

There is a simple workaround. Open the exported rtf in Annotation Transcriber or TextEdit and save the file as HTML. MS Word can read HTML. To continue with active links in Annotation Transcriber please save your MS Word-Document as rtf. Please note: MS Word garbles the links when saving as word or html.

Why do you export text and not pictures?

We believe pictures are the very last resort to represent text. To enable complete control till publishing your video, text should be editable at any state.
For instance the DVD standard does not allow full anti-aliasing. Quality relies more on processing settings done in the DVD authoring environment and the DVD player, than on imported pictures. So why not choose the more elegant way?
Update: Since Blu-Ray allows stylish font setting, All Blu-ray image formats are supported for Blu-Ray BDN.

Why do you don't support styles within subtitles?

Final Cut Pro up to 5.1 does not support styles for single words. Styles have been added to other exchange formats after the file format was finished. So there may be proprietary dialects and that will lead to a more complicated workflow - including garbled text.
We believe data exchange should be as clean, error free and lossless as possible.

What is the difference between Annotation Studio Server and browser-based Annotation Server?

Annotation Studio Server is a high performance workgroup server based on Apple WebObjects. For more information you send a mail to zeitAnker Serverinfo.
Our browser-based Annotation Server is set up on an open source CMS. So you can start at very little costs.
If your video archive needs more perfomance because of tens of thousands of videos and hundreds of concurrent users, we can scale up.

Why is the text missing when importiing XML into Final Cut Pro?

You will have to install our Final Cut Pro plugin before import. The plugin is free, so if you send your project to another machine, be sure to install the plugin there as well.

Software update is sometimes out of sync

As the call for updates is answered by a webserver, typical webpage caching may occur. That should vanish automatically the next day.

Wann kommt das deutsche Handbuch?

Nachdem alle Fenheiten der englischen Fassung abgeschlossen sind. Zur Zeit ist Englisch die Primärsprache, auch weil es in Deutschland ganz gut verstanden wird .... Die Kurzbefehle sind aus ergonomischen Gründen verschieden, daher liegt provisorisch eine ältere Fassung des deutschen Handbuch bei.

Who is this laughing guy in the QuickTime viewer?

We now know. The actor is Richard Massingham. More information here on screenonline . The complete video for download can be found on archive.org: Pedestrian Crossing. Trust me, the movie is very amusing.