Date and time stamp

I am looking for a plugin that will stamp the time and date from the metadata of a clip on screen in final cut.

From what camera/format? Most don't survive intact after import.

Noah

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I assume you mean date/time the shot was taken. That's been a request for a very long time, so far unfulfilled AFAIK. Confoundingly enough, that metadata is preserved during capture, it would seem, since that is apparently what Start/Stop detection uses to detect shot boundaries. Why that info isn't easier to get at for other purposes is a mystery.

Scott

On of the problems is that if and where that data exists depends entirely upon the type of media and the extraction methods would have to be written for every supported file type. For example DV DATECODE is preserved encoded within one area of the auxiliary data, and HDV DATECODE is encoded within another ... and I would assume the same goes for AVCHD and other consumer formats that might support DATECODE (and the latter of course is transcoded so any such data would be lost). And quite apart from it being difficult, there are actually quite a lot of patents on methods for extracting that data ...

gbean, as stated here there is no real solution to your problem, but if the number of clips where you want the date and time stamp is limited (and they are DV clips), you might try the following partially manual workaround:
- use the FootTrack application (not a FCP plugin) to read the actual Date and Time of each clip: if you feed it with the same media file captured by FCP, in Foottrack you get the same number of clips as those created by the FCP DV Start/Stop Detect command
- Foottrack lists the start Date and Time (and timecode) for each clip
- use the free filter FCE Timecode Display to insert the date and time read using Foottrack into your FCP clips. The main use of this FCE/FCP plugin is to display the clip timecode (which you don't need here), but as a bonus you also get the manual display of Date and Time.
Even if there is no way to get an automatic display, the plugin will automatically increment date and time after you manually initialized it with the information read by Foottrack. Read the web page instructions for details.

Piero

Piero's comment brings up an interesting point - FootTrack seems to have no trouble extracting the date/time metadata from DV files, why is it a stretch to expect FCP to be able to do the same? Granted, different media/codec formats may require different translations, but capturing itself has to deal with the same issues, so why not this particular metadata? Very often the date/time something was shot is very valuable to me, but there's no way to get it except by loading the tape into the camera and letting it give me that info (or using Piero's method, which is the same amount of work, but at least gives you a permanent record to refer to later).

I don't understand why this is treated as rocket science.

Scott

If you have a feature request use Feedback. It's been requested before. It's obviously not something that prominent on their radar. Most professionals don't give a toss about the date/time stamp.

Tom,

I somehow agree with you.
But since we are facing a future of tapeless workflows it will get a higher priority in the radar. There won't be tapes, there could be spanned clips as we have now with P2 and other tapeless formats. And finally there will be more formats.

The DV25 times are something like the "Those were the days my friend ..."
We all will have enough things like this "simple" date/time thing to discuss in the future

Andreas

There are a few utilities for Windows that will time stamp DV, but I'm not aware of anything that will run natively on a Mac.

For example I believe DVMP Pro can be run in VMWare Fusion on a Mac, and you can use this to view the recording date and time, timecode and even the camera exposure details when playing DV or HDV (m2t) files. It will also "stamp" the frames of DV or HDV files with any of this info.

It will also give you the recording start date and time of more file types (DV, Raw DV, MOD, HDV, AVCHD), so you might be able to use that for the timecode display filter mentioned earlier.

You have to select a "windowed" renderer in the options, due to Fusion's emulated graphics driver, and I'm not sure how smoothly it will play HDV files in the emulated environment of Fusion.