Sanction II supports various media file types including MPEG, AVI, WAV, MOV and various other file formats supported by the Microsoft Media Player Controls control.
Media files can be added to Sanction II in the same fashion as other file types, either by dragging and dropping, or by importing from a load file. When dragging and dropping, you may give the media files any valid ID in the same manner as documents and images. When you add multiple media files to the same group, each file is treated as a "page" in the group.
Keep in mind that you must add the files to the same group if you intend on using the synchronized transcript features in the Clip Creator. This is because a synchronized transcript can contain timestamps spanning multiple files. If the files are not located in the same group, only the first file can be accessed with timestamp information.
Look at the following example:
Suppose you have a video deposition consisting of three MPEGs each running approx. 2 hours. You also have an ASCII transcript file for the given deposition date.
The lengths of each MPEG are:
MPEG1 - 01:53:12
MPEG2 - 02:00:03
MPEG3 - 01:51:36
If the transcript file is synchronized (or you wish to synchronize it yourself using the Transcript Manager utility), you must add the three MPEGs to the same group. By adding the MPEGs to the same group, and then associating the transcript, Sanction II will recognize that at the end of the first MPEG, timestamps for the next MPEG will be begin at the cumulative time point, in this case 01:53:13 for the second MPEG and at 03:53:16 for the third (the sum of each previous MPEG).
In this example we have used the deponent name as the group.
Without associating the files in a group, each MPEG would begin at 00:00:00, since each MPEG is it's own group.
If you do not have an associated transcript, adding media files to a group has no effect on clip creation since there is no need to track the length of each file.
Regardless of whether you add files as a group or individually, manual clip creation is not affected, only the synchronized features are affected by grouping.