P: Read and write video metadata into video or sidecar

This is the technique that the Any File plugin uses -- it creates a "proxy" JPEG thumbnail that gets imported into the catalog, and it transfers all metadata from the video file or its sidecars (e.g. .thm's) to the proxy file. Any metadata changes you make in lightroom are written to the proxy JPEG.

I have decided to use the following as a temporary work-around to this problem:

Canon, at least, creates a thm file for every movie file. A thm file stores some of the metadata associated with the movie file (like date/time), and can be used to store other any other IPTC metadata like location, latitude/longitude. Lightroom, of course ignores the thm file. However if you duplicate the thm files as jpg files (I have an applescript that does this), then Lightroom will at least treat the jpg files as "first class" citizens, allowing you to save metadata in them, and write metadata to them from other programs.

If you use other programs to change metadata in your image files (like georeferencing) or if you just like to have the metadata saved with the image so you can share it with other people and other programs, the "JPEG sidecar" is at least a partial solution.

For Mac users, the following AppleScript will duplicate all thm files in a directory to jpg files.

==

set theFolder to choose folder with prompt "Choose a folder of thm files."
tell application "Finder" to set thmFiles to files of theFolder whose name extension is "THM"

repeat with f in thmFiles
set src to POSIX path of (f as text)
set dest to ((characters 1 thru -4 of src) as text) & "jpg"
set whatIwouldDo to "cp " & quoted form of src & " " & quoted form of dest
try
do shell script whatIwouldDo
end try
end repeat

From the original thread:

LR has problems creating folders organized by capture time (there are other threads here and in the user-to-user forum on that topic).

Finally, that the time is off by 68 years indicates a very specific bug, the use of a 32- bit variable rather than a 64-bit variable to hold a time value. A signed 32-bit integer can only represent the number of seconds equivalent to +/- 68 years. There was a similar bug in LR 3 for Mac:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3701469

In reality, the video was taken last week. The camera is a Samsung TL350, so it is not that old, and the files are in MP4 format. Attached are two screenshots, one showing Lightroom's idea that the video is from 1945, and another from Windows showing that the file was created on 1/29/2013 at 6 pm.

Is there at least a workaround for this? Right now, I have to copy these files manually, or Lightroom puts them in wacky folders based on random, ancient dates.

The fact that LR can't save metadata to video files is a severe limitation and makes it next to useless for video processing. I don't understand really why? Bridge can do it, why not Lightroom? I understand that there maybe performance penalties but that can be dealt with by some "batch syncing" to files.

Hey In case anyone is interested here is the Final Cut Pro XML format specification pdf

I'm sure that there is a similar document for Premier and Avid.

-louie

One can only hope that the LIghtroom development team will get the resources necessary to follow the current metadata standards that are already being used in Premier and Final Cut Pro X.

-louie

That is a good comment, thanks. Did you click the +1 at the top ".... people have this problem". Maybe if we get enough hits, Adobe will finally address this problem.

Even if Lightroom (4.2) can't write to THM sidecar files, there doesn't seem to any reason it couldn't at least read all the exif & iptc fields. I set the IPTC "Title" field using a separate program (exiftool), and it causes me many problems that Lightroom can't read this field for my .MOV files, and maintains a separate, unsynchronized value for this field.

exiftool is a free and highly tested tool that Adobe could easily add to Lightroom to handle cases where their team hasn't gotten around to writing the code, I wish that Adobe would use it (or write their own code) so that video is a "first class" citizen in Lightroom.

this was a problem in LR 3 too, and Adobe added more video functionality into LR 4 but conveniently skipped this. Google Picasa does this for free!