OnCue's designation wizard

It's no secret that attorneys will list deposition designation page and line ranges in a variety of formats. The same attorney may use a page / line range form inconsistently, and of course, even the best lawyers will inevitably enter page and line numbers incorrectly. Like nearly all litigation support professionals, I have spent many hours parsing through lists of designations to put them in the format required by TextMap, Trial Director, and other applications.

Luckily, OnCue's trial presentation software includes a 'Designation Wizard' which can import page and line ranges that have been listed in a variety of forms. Not just loads files in the format used by Lexis TextMap (as discussed in the Tip of the Night for May 5, 2024), or the format used by Sanction, but in almost any random form an attorney might come up with.

In this example, we can see how page line numbers entered with different delimiters (both using common delimiter characters) and common terms used in English), get interpreted as designation ranges by OnCue which then automatically generates designation snippets. If it can't tell that range is intended, it will highlight the unknown range in red:

Even when ranges are entered with extra spaces between page and line numbers, or with different delimiters for a single range, OnCue can still get them correct:

You copy ranges in, or enter them one by one, and the Designation Wizard creates the new video clips almost in realtime.

The Wizard will help you catch mistakes you might have otherwise missed, and get video clips finalized for the next morning faster, so you can get to bed sooner - the key challenge every trial tech faces.

Imports of TextMap Annotations Into OnCue As Deposition Designations

Sorry for not posting for a while. I was hot seating a trial, and was just too busy to update the site.

The OnCue trial electronic presentation software makes it easy to import deposition designations added as annotations in TextMap as new designations for video clips to be played in the courtroom. You can simply go to File . . . Import . . . Import Designations , select a .csv file exported from TextMap and import the annotations.

In version 9.1 of TextMap, annotations will be exported in this format.

Note that in order to complete the import into OnCue you will need to change the headings from 'Transcript' to 'Deponent', and from 'PgFrm' 'LnFrom' 'PgTo' and 'LnTo' to simply 'Page' and 'Line', and change 'Issues' to 'Linked Issues'. OnCue does not allow entries in the Notes field of TextMap to be imported into a field in its database, but having this as a field in the .csv file will not affect the import.

OnCue has a limitation in handling imports of annotations from TextMap. While TextMap will export ranges with multiple issues on a single row with the issues separated by semi-colons, OnCue cannot import designation ranges to which more than one issue is assigned. OnCue terms issue designations as 'highlighters'. Unless each issue is placed on a separate row, you will get an 'Unknown highlighter ID' when importing.

It's necessary to edit the .csv file exported from TextMap this way, adding duplicate rows for individual issues:

With the updated .csv file, the import can be completed. The set of designations will be imported as a new set of designations named after the name of the .csv file.

checking VRAM in DirectX

A Windows operating system uses an API (application programming interface) called DirectX to allow programs installed on your PC to work with the video and audio of your computer. You can bring up the diagnostics tool for DirectX by going to Run and entering: dxdiag

The DirectX Diagnostic Tool will have tabs for each set of monitors and speakers connected to your computer. A tab named 'Render' will display information for the dedicated graphics card on your PC. It will show the VRAM for your PC - the amount of computer memory dedicated to graphics:

The very first tip of the night on April 12, 2015 warned to never try to use Trial Director or other presentation software for a courtroom electronic presentation without confirming that your laptop has sufficient VRAM. Trust me, I know from bitter experience that video clips for deposition designations with multiple segments will not play back correctly on a laptop without sufficient VRAM. The current version of Trial Director requires a graphics card with 4 GB of dedicated graphics memory. See the specs posted here.

Use the DirectX Diagnostic Tool to check how much VRAM the monitors and projectors you are connected to will require.