Use a Script to Create Video Clips in Trial Director

Creating video clips in Trial Director can be a time consuming and tedious process. You help move the process along by using a script to create multiple clips at once. Hopefully an attorney will have included page and line references in a table or outline, or even better annotated passages in TextMap or Livenote, and not highlighted a hard copy. Anything that will allow you to collect the beginning and ending page and line references and arrange them in a spreadsheet.

The format of the script is simple.

!([Deposition Transcript Name])

C([Clip Name])

BegPage:Line-EndPage:Line

. . . so for example,

!(Smith, John (Vol. 1) 7/4/2014)

C(Smith 001)

110:5-112:8

!(Smith, John (Vol. 1) 7/4/2014)

C(Smith 002)

183:14-187:22

. . . you just add a blank line when you want to start a new clip. Save the text file that you create with a '.ccs' extension. Go to the Clip menu on the Transcript Manager tab and select 'Execute Clip Creation Script' and browse to the file you created. While going through the wizard be sure to check the option for 'Automatically Adjust Page/Line Segment(s)', so the software uses the time codes embedded in the synched up transcript loaded into Trial Director.

After you're done it may still be necessary to tweak the clips slightly by a fraction of a second or so. In any event, you have saved yourself valuable time in the crunch before a trial.