Capturing Date and Time Info to AVI.
 

I've been copying my Digital8 tapes to PC for editing and am having a hard time keeping all of the scenes in chronological order. I'm having to go back to the original tapes to verify when the scenes were shot, and if I've got them in the right order, which is an extremely time-consuming task. My problem would be solved if I could get the date/time stamps of the recordings embedded into the .AVI files when I'm transferring the tapes, but I can't find out how to do this.

There's got to be a way to capture this information, but then again I've never seen an avi player with the equivalent of the camcorder's "Data Code" button for viewing the date and time of the clip.

I've got a Sony DCR-TRV315 digital8 and am using Ulead's VisualStudio 6. I'm capturing through Firewire.

Thanks,
Rusty

I am not aware of anyway to do this. The best solution would be to build multiple folders to organize these clips.

You could name the .avi files by date, or do what Nathan said and capture each different date into a different bin. You could also always make a paper list :)

Might take a look at CatDV for logging and cataloging Digital Video.

For DV the date/time that is used for the original recording is in
fact on tape/file!!! The problem is that almost no program
seems to use this information (doh). I think QuickTime player shows
the information in the properties. I have written a small program
that can extract the information as well, but it is currently not
very easy to use. If you really need it I might be able to bang
something together for you quickly. If so, mail me at visuar@iname.com

Quicktime does indeed list it in the video properties.

Is there an editing soft that could read/use the date/time on the DV avi file? I'd like to write some text on the video image, that contains the actual date/time from the avi file. Is that posible?

Not to my knowledge, Cosmin. Perhaps the more professional
NLE's like Avid support this, but I'm not sure...

Cosmin,

Cat DV 3.0 Pro might do what you need. It uses QT and reads many of the properties. I don't know about AVI's. You might try emailing there support to see how they are supported.

I found a litle (free) plugin for VDub (also free!). I didn't try it yet. I hope it works!

If you import DV with Scenalyzer, it will by default name the .AVI files with somename'DATE TIME.avi

It also chops up the DV stream into individual shots if you so choose (obviously needed for the above application)

Find it at www.scenalyzer.com

Was that what you were looking for?

Hans Henrik

Cosmin,

What plugin did you find? Does it work?

Hi!

Here is the plugin:
http://toonarchive.com/addframenumbers/

I think I found the link somwere on this forum! I'm not sure...

Anyway, didn't try it yet. I miss some spare time...

I don't think that this plugin will read information from the DV
stream. I think it just creates the information for you...

But ofcourse it is worth a try!