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137

P: Read and write video metadata into video or sidecar

Community Beginner ,
Jan 18, 2012 Jan 18, 2012

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The new Video part is great! I really like the previews.It is a great addition to sort and tag your video's. Only one problem:The tagging system doesn't work properly, it doesn't store the tags in the video-files like it is possible with the photo's. I hope this will be working in the Final.

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108 Comments
LEGEND ,
Jun 16, 2015 Jun 16, 2015

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I'm using Lightroom 4 and would really appreciate if Adobe allowed metadata to be written to the video files. The preset should work for BOTH photo and video. Please HELP!

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LEGEND ,
Aug 17, 2015 Aug 17, 2015

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Seriously.... This ****** sucks, Picasa3 wich is free doesn't have this kind of junk problems.... Hate this sucker software.....

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New Here ,
Oct 29, 2015 Oct 29, 2015

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LR6 - I import a video, include it in a Slideshow. If the date is shown, it is the date imported, not the date the video was shot. Using exiftool, I set every date in the metadata to the date it was shot (including the file creation date), reimported it - same result. LR6 just can't get it right. How many releases does it take to get this right?

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New Here ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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Why doesn't Lightroom write metadata to video files or xmp side car files associated with video files? I'd like to write common IPTC metadata to my still and video images from my DSLR at the same time. It appears any metadata associated with a video file (.mov from and Nikon D4 in my case) is only available in the Lightroom Catalog. I need it to be available in other applications as I share the file. I've done some testing and Photo Mechanic creates an XMP file which is read by other applications.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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Basic information like lens & camera are missing in Lightroom for video files. Specifically the D800 and S100 camera. The information is available in the files and can be seen using exiftool. It would be great to have this information available in Lightroom to search.

Further, the Video Frame Rate & Video Dimensions is picked up for the D800 but not the S100. It would also be great to be able to search of these two fields as well (in the Library Filter).

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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The Sony RX series (or at least my RX100 m3) stores its movie files in a separate folder from the pictures. Every time I import photos I have to make sure I've gone into that folder and manually dragged and dropped in the videos as well. The videos also come with some separate files that contain all the metadata for the videos. It'd be great if those could be auto-imported as well and used to fill in metadata for the movies.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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Is there a plugin or fix so that Lightroom 4.2 will read/write metadata to video? I purchased Lightroom as the next evolution from using Google Picasa. But I'm finding my albums showing up in weird order, with videos sometimes pulling in correct date and other names wrong date and ending up at end of sequence (and thus out-of-order).

Not cool for organizing personal collections of photos/video.

Having just spent a fair amount of money for Lightroom, I'm not inclined to go back (plus I like the RAW support). But this seems like an easy fix and that should be fixed? But it seems like this problem has existed since LR3?

Sort of confusing to me for such a high-end program.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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.

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New Here ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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.

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Contributor ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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.)

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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"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.

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Explorer ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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.

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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

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LEGEND ,
Dec 04, 2015 Dec 04, 2015

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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?

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Contributor ,
Dec 06, 2015 Dec 06, 2015

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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

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 07, 2015 Dec 07, 2015

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Hi John, Canon for example provides a lot of useful metadata about the video via the .thm sidecar file (really a JPEG thumbnail). Lr really depended on the presence of .thm to get most of the video metadata, such as camera make, model, lens info and capture time etc. Without the .thm and without Lr being able to understand the proprietary EXIF format stored in the videos generated by Canon, Fuji or Panasonic camera (the only camera vendors that does this as far as we know), Lr used to drop the video metadata on the floor.

The fix would be at least be able to read those video metadata as much as the vendor willing to support for such scenarios. The writing of video metadata is another beast. LR is certainly not going to support writing back the metadata in the proprietary EXIF blocks.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 07, 2015 Dec 07, 2015

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Understood. That's why the same approach used for proprietary raw files could apply to videos: read the metadata from the various industry standard and proprietary formats, write back to industry standard formats, write back to sidecars for proprietary formats.

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Contributor ,
Dec 08, 2015 Dec 08, 2015

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>If exiftool can do it Adobe surely do a better job
That is a myth :-). Big companies like Adobe needs to follow the rules. Adobe cannot reverse engineer some other companies proprietary implementation without the legal clearance and cooperation from the respective vendors. There is a very big difference here.

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LEGEND ,
Dec 18, 2015 Dec 18, 2015

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_^^-WHO-^^____^^-WHEN-^^
__ [name] ____ [# d/yr ago]__

Oh, the irony... Each comment here begins with the person's icon, their name, and the number of days/months/years ago the the comment was posted.

And if you roll over the "4 years ago" text, it will then show you the specific date and time that the comment was posted. Go ahead, give it a try...

For instance, go to the original post at the top. It currently says "4 years ago." The rollover text specifies the date as being January 18, 2012. But I'm typing this on Dec 18, 2015. So, the comment is NOT from "4 years ago" -- sure, a month from now it will be, but it's not, now.

Check the others -- on some, the time differential is nearly four months.


So really... what is it about Adobe that they should be challenged by time stamps?

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Guest
Apr 14, 2016 Apr 14, 2016

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Lightroom doesn't allow users to read or write video metadata from or back to a file. This is a problem, especially since videos I imported a while ago aren't displaying the camera make and model.

I'd like to read the metadata from the video files, but Lightroom doesn't allow me to do so. Instead, I need to remove these video files from my library and import them again, losing the rating, labels, and location metadata I had already applied to them.

There's no reason why this feature should be disabled for video files. Also, it should be possible to write video metadata to sidecar .XMP files.

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LEGEND ,
Jun 14, 2016 Jun 14, 2016

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An Adobe rep said I should submit a feature request form to embed metadata into video files but sent me to a URL to do so which is this forum.  Excuse me as I am new to the forum but am I correct this is not the place to submit a FEATURE REQUEST FORM?

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New Here ,
Jun 14, 2016 Jun 14, 2016

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Given users have been asking for at least XMP file support for video for years with no change, no this doesn't seem to be the place for feature requests. The only program I've found that creates XMP files for video metadata is Photo Mechanic. It creates them and DAMs like Canto Cumulus can read them. I wish Adobe would get with it and do the same in Lightroom, Bridge, etc. I get it that the original video files don't support embedding metadata directly into the files, much like RAW still files. But XMP is a solution for all. A video equivalent of DNG that encapsulates an original video file would be even better.

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LEGEND ,
Jun 14, 2016 Jun 14, 2016

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This forum is indeed where Adobe wants feature requests, bug reports, and other feedback.  And you've found the right topic.

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