P: Read and write video metadata into video or sidecar

Around the time before the release of the 5D3, Canon stopped creating the .thm files which had a lot of useful metadata. It will be really helpful to be able to have access to that information again.

While your at it would you please add some code to correctly evaluate Quicktime date/time that include a timezone offset. It seems that all iPhone videos use the UTC date/time with a timezone offset. Lightroom currently ignores the timezone and uses the raw UTC data/time which messes up capture time sorts and file renaming if based on date/time.

It seems logical that if the date/time has an timezone offset that Lightroom should use that to calculate the internal date/time. If the internal date/time does not have a timezone offset then default to the local system timezone.

tks,

-louie

Can you say more about what you mean by "EXIF" here? Technically, the EXIF specification doesn't say anything about video, just still images and audio.

Do you mean that there isn't a single, widely accepted specification for metadata fields that would be populated by video-capturing cameras (exposure, lens information, frame rate, etc.), as there is for still cameras?

I was referring to read/writing EXIF metadata standard for video.

What seems to be odd though is that the same vendor (Adobe) seems to have a product that handles writing video metadata just fine. I regularly use Adobe Bridge to do this. I can't say for sure it works with all vendors but I haven't had problems with video formats (.wmv, .mov, .mp4) from Apple, Canon, and Nokia as well as those videos created with Adobe Encoder. Why that can't same functionality be made available in LR beats me. If there are some "purist" objections because of "non-standard" methods, make it optional.

"There is no industry standard to store EXIF in the .mov/.mp4 video file formats."

I'm confused by this -- the QuickTime and MPEG-4 standards do define how to store metadata. In addition, Adobe's "XMP Specification Part 3: Storage in Files" (July 2010) explicitly defines how to embed arbitrary XMP metadata within dynamic media formats like QuickTime (.mov) and MPEG-4 (.mp4) and in video package formats like AVCHD, Panasonic's P2, and Sony's formats.

Nothing would stop Lightroom from using the exact same approach it uses for industry-standard image formats (TIFF, JPEG, PNG) and proprietary camera raw formats:

- For industry-standard formats (e.g. QuickTime and MPEG-4), if a metadata field is defined by the standard, write back changes to that field. Otherwise, write the field to embedded XMP.

- For proprietary formats, read field values from the format but store changes in an XMP sidecar.

There will be some bug fixes in this area in the next release update (lr 6.4), particularly for customers who shoot videos using Canon, Fuji and Panasonic cameras. There is no industry standard to store EXIF in the .mov/.mp4 video file formats.

Vendors such like Canon, Fuji and Panasonic decided to store EXIF in their own proprietary formats for videos. It took a while for the Lightroom team to talk to each vendors to get their blessing to expose those EXIF video metadata.

The problem with .mov files is that the QuickTime specification "strongly recommends" that dates/times be stored in UTC, and the specification doesn't provide a place to store the time zone. So there's no 100% correct way that LR could recognize the time zone of a QuickTime file.

But if LR assumed that the video was captured in the same time zone as the computer in which LR is running, it would greatly reduce the number of times users have to shift the capture time after import. LR could also compare the filesystem create and modified dates of the file with the capture time in the metadata to guess the time zone of capture (since the filesystem dates are in the local time of the device that captured it).

But given Adobe's complete lack of attention to video metadata since video was added to LR 4, I think it's unlikely that LR will ever correctly handle QuickTime video dates.

See this bug report for more details: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

(Shame on Apple, and on all engineers, including the authors of the original EXIF, for not including time zones in their designs.)

The date format recorded in many video file formats uses UTC time with a timezone offset. Lightroom simply ignores this. So all my iPhone .MOV files get a date/time recorded in Lightroom as the unadjusted UTC also known as GMT.

This means for me in the PST/PDT timezone all my videos are in Lightroom as 8 or 9 hours earlier than all my images taken at the same time. It got really confusing because I rename my files on import with the capture time so any movie taken after 4 or 5 PM got the date as tomorrow since the UTC time had passed midnight.

I have concluded that video support in Lightroom is barely sufficient for any thing other than basic viewing.

When will Lightroom import/show metadata present in video files (like EXIF)?

At least items available as file rename tokens (during import) should be supported, like when importing photo.

Make Prelude like functionality a part of Lightroom or vice versa and making LR the input/entry Metadata manager. No reason why LR couldn't do for video what it does for stills, ie. add a few basic features, like brightness and contrast, metadata tagging, and allow you to do the 'ingest' and Prelude like functions as well. Goal is to have one metadata tagging location and have it flow to all products.