Loading Video Clips in Trial Director's Coding Database

Trial Director, along with Lexis's Sanction, is one of the two most widely used trial presentation programs. The two main tasks performed with trial presentation software are the presentation and annotating of trial exhibit documents, and the playing of video clips. Deposition transcripts and videos will often be loaded into programs like Lexis TextMap, which allows you to create video clips in the .wmv format, but which doesn't also create .cms load files for Trial Director or other synch files that allow the video clips to be shown synched up with a scrolling transcript highlighting each line as it is spoken, or simply with closed captioning. In this situation you can simply drag and drop the video files into Trial Director, and choose the default option to have the document ID be the same as the file name - 'Smith Clip 001'; 'Lopez Depo 2' or whatever format was chosen. The trouble is that you can't easily search through the lines that are spoken as you would if the clips were created in Trial Director from a transcript loaded and synched with a MPEG video.

To get around this, export the annotated text with the page and line references from TextMap or another program and organize it in an Excel spreadsheet with the video file names listed in an adjoining column. Save the spreadsheet as a .csv file. Then click on the last tab on the right in Trial Director named, 'Coding'. Choose 'Importing Coding Data' from the Coding menu and load up the .csv file. You will be prompted to match the fields in the Trial Director coding database (in a pick list in the middle named 'Database fields') with the column headings from your spreadsheet (in a pick list on the left named 'Import file fields'). Match up the file names of the video clips with the Doc_BegPagId database field and move it over to the right. Match up the other spreadsheet columns with appropriate Trial Director database fields and complete the import.

Now you'll be able to search through the text of the clips, or the page and line references to help find the clips that you need. Choose the appropriate field under 'Select all Documents where' , set Field X to be equal to or contain whatever string you're looking for. [See the screen grab below]. The table will be filtered to just the hits you're looking for and when you select a row, the clip will be loaded up and be ready to be display in presentation mode.