Convert one long raw eeg recording file to BIDS format

[Alagebra]

Hi, all. I’m completely new to eeg data analysis and wish to use mne to perform the preprocessing. And I came across this post where they talk about using mne-bids to do the preprocessing. https://mne.discourse.group/t/preprocessing-pipeline-tips-and-tricks-for-eeg-data/3552[https://mne.discourse.group/t/preprocessing-pipeline-tips-and-tricks-for-eeg-data/3552]

And I would like to give it a shot. So I see that I need to convert my eeg file to bids format.

One question is that during the recording, I leave the recording on all the time. So the resulting file contains about 3 mins of practicing trials and following blocks, each lasting ~5min and inter-block rest lasting about 30 seconds. So my question is, when convert this file to bids format for the following preprocessing steps, do I need crop the file first ? So that each block is separated to a different run file and disgard all the inter block rest data points ?

If so, is there any agreed-upon procedure to do this ? For example, specifying how many data points I should leave before and after each block.

Plus, if I were to do the preprocessing using mne manually, do I still need to crop out all the inter-block rest data points ?

[richard (Richard Höchenberger)]

Hello @Alagebra and welcome to the forum!

You have two options:

1. annotate the breaks / training as “bad” before converting to BIDS, or
2. crop the data and create one BIDS file per block (“run”)

I would usually prefer the 2nd option, but it’s also a matter of taste to some extent.

@sappelhoff may have some input on this as well.

Best wishes,
Richard

[Alagebra]

@richard Thank you so much for your reply!