HMC150, Metadata, and Sony Vegas

toddgeer

toddgeer

Active member
Back in the days of DV, importing captured media into a Sony Vegas project offered a usable feature - in the Project Media window, one could see the date/time stamp of a clip and therefore know when that clip was captured. It was very helpful when pouring over the myriad clips to find the one that was shot at a specific time.

Importing MTS files into Vegas, however, the Project Media window does not display that information.

Sony support cites the HMC150 manual and it appears that the date/time information isn't saved to the clip. Really weird.

Am I and Sony missing something? Anyone else have this issue or concern? Any workaround ideas?
 
More info: I now see that the timecode doesn't seem to behave right either.

I have the TC set to Free Run, and when a clip is recorded then transferred then opened in Vegas, the clip shows a TC In of 0, with a TC Out of the length of the clip - the TC as supposedly recorded by the cam into the clip isn't found by Vegas.

?
 
Im using FCP, but yes same problem. I really need the date/time info from my HMC150 clips and it is looking as though it was not saved to the clip. ugg... If you figure anything out let me know!
 
Twig said:
Im using FCP, but yes same problem. I really need the date/time info from my HMC150 clips and it is looking as though it was not saved to the clip. ugg... If you figure anything out let me know!
Click to expand...

Interesting. FCP too. And yes, Date/Time stamp, vital for me!

About the time I posted this in here, I was in touch with Panasonic and Sony, and both pointed fingers at the other. I dropped it for lack of evidence.

Since then, more and more folks are reporting the problem in forums. I wrote a "let me know if you're having this issue too" post in a few Creative Cow forums. Collectively, I've found out that Adobe CS4 had the problem, but CS5 does not. Sony Vegas has the problem, all versions. Avid Media Composer 5 does not. It appears to be a software issue not a camera issue.

If I end up finding anything out, it will be about Sony - so you might want to get help from FCP about your issue. They'll try to put it back on Panasonic, but with many apps having the issue and some not having it, it's obviously not the camera!
 
If you happen to directly copy the contents of your cards to disk (or still have the contents on the original card), the date/timestamp on the files themselves should remain the same. This is a nice bonus of solid state, but the AVCHD format does feel very consumer-ish not having per-frame info as was available with DV.

If you happened to use AVCCAM viewer or any other program that re-writes the files as your only copy, it will not be accurate. I didn't realize the date/time was stored in the meta data. If so, I'd imagine the AVCCAM Viewer program would be able to pull it up.

It was widely known that CS4 did not support any metadata, but it appears that CS5 at least grabs the start timecode
 
Researching the same issues, etc. I don't need a huge asset database at the moment.... just the date/time stamps from the clips would be great!

:-)

To that end... if you export the XML for a clip from FCP, you will see that all of the camera (in my case, HMC 150) metadata is there. I just can't seem to figure out how to easily (workflow!!!) have it displayed in the bin browser. So this means FCP did ingest all of the metadata when it transcoded the clips... but I can't figure out how to have it displayed within the program.

XML fields such as "<key>com.panasonic.professionalplugin.p2.clipmetadata.shoot.startdate</key>" would be really useful to have displayed within FCP.
 
I wish. That didn't work for me, unfortunately. I think I tried every iteration of copying to be sure that when I created the ticket with Sony, it was a real problem.



mcsmooth said:
If you happen to directly copy the contents of your cards to disk (or still have the contents on the original card), the date/timestamp on the files themselves should remain the same. This is a nice bonus of solid state, but the AVCHD format does feel very consumer-ish not having per-frame info as was available with DV.

If you happened to use AVCCAM viewer or any other program that re-writes the files as your only copy, it will not be accurate. I didn't realize the date/time was stored in the meta data. If so, I'd imagine the AVCCAM Viewer program would be able to pull it up.

It was widely known that CS4 did not support any metadata, but it appears that CS5 at least grabs the start timecode
Click to expand...
 
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