Thanks Dave. That just seems completely bizarre to me.

You mention some software that can display it. For example...?

Bruce

Here is a link to Visual DV TmeStamp; it is not free http://www.download.com/Visual-DV-Time-Stamp/3000-2194_4-10349086.html

I contacted them by email to get directions on how to update the timestamp on the file without "stamping" the date on my video. Here is the what they sent me:

If all you need is changing the file time attributes (create/modify times),
then DTS/vDTS is an overkill (takes long time and use a lot temperally disk
space).

If you do want to try, here is how:

- Turn on the preferences of DTS/vDTS to make the stamped file's create-time
the time of the first frame of the file, and the modify-time that of the
last frame.
- Turn on stamp time or date, but set the stamp location such that it will
be outside the video frame (e.g. x=720, y = 0)
- Set the duration to minimal stamping (e.g. periodically stamp 1 sec in
every 9999 sec).
- Stamp your file.

As a result of this, the stamped file will have correct time attributes set,
everything else will be exactly the same as your original file.

The capturing application from MS should show the DTS. Choose details in the view settings of the media bin right after capturing. This is indeed something very few editing software will show...MS is actually one of them!

You can also search for a util called scenalizer by Matrox, it is a free utility, that is able to split large dv-streams by DTS, and will also show in a separate .txt file all existing DTS instances.

Good luck

Thanks Bart! I'll try this out. I guess I must have assumed that the 'details' view showed the DTS of the clip at the time the video was captured to the PC, not when it was originall shot.

And thanks tceaves, I'll check that out too.

I noticed for the first time in "Sony Video Capture Window" the "clip explorer" shows a time/stamp that is the correct date and time from when the video was taken... Now, if it is there it was captured and Sony Vegas MS can read it.

There must be a way to get that date to show in the media pool. There just must be? :0)

The DTS data is surely there. But as soon as I move the clip to another folder that data is lost. So it's there but I don't know how to get it back anywhere else.

As for the other tool, Visual DV Time Stamp, recommended by tceaves, it seems to work as advertised and would be a handy tool to have around for those times when you can't get the DTS info via MS.

I tried to select the data shown by the details view (in Vegas Video Capture) into a simple ASCII file but no luck.

Thanks for the help everyone. One reason I like MS is because of the excellent forum.

One of the warnings on the vDTS page is that if you don't capture the DTS right after capturing the clip you run the risk of losing the DTS altogether.

So I tried a test where I loaded a clip captured in June of 2003 into MS, cut out the last 90%, re-rendered to AVI and loaded that resulting AVI into vDTS and lo and behold the time stamp info was still there!

I don't know if all AVI renderers preserve this information, but MS does, which means I can now go back through stacks of old clips and retrieve the original DTS.

Very handy application! Thanks again for the tip tceaves.

Oh, and I could find no way to get the DTS info anywhere in MS except from the clip bin in the capture app.

There is another way!

There is a tool called DV Date that is a FREE simple utility that will rename AVI files with the timestamp encoded on the AVI video clip. Here is the link: http://paul.glagla.free.fr/dvdate_en.htm#what
After renaming the AVI files I used another rename utility for JPG files to rename those in the same format (you can find several of these utilities at www.download.com) . Then when I put all the video clips & photos in the media pool and sort by file name they are all in date order.

This saves me hours of work each year. I take video & photos of the family all year long and trying to get the video clips & photos in date order is a tedious job and when you are chronicling a entire year for the Christmas project this is important… at least for the high type “A” home movie editors. Hahahah :0)

Hope this helps someone else - it is a big help to me.

Thomas

Yeah, I downloaded that one too. Haven't had a chance to throw any DV at it yet though. Sounds like all the methods mentioned in this thread are good tools to have so that you can use the right one for the right job.

With DV Date, if I capture an entire tape to one file, can I use DV Date to go through the file and find all the relevant DTS's?

I don't really need a lot of the power of vDTS (although the visual preview is a must) as all I want to do is get a quick indication of when the video was taken so that I can add that as title text in MS if I want to. For doing only that, vDTS seems to overkill.

I do very few events and more "highlight reel" type videos so I always use "clips".

When I capture I have it set to create clips based on the start/stop record button use. I think that is the default; this creates individual AVI files for each "clip".

I recently started capturing that way instead of the whole tape as one file, but I recently had a case where it didn't work and I ended up with two different scenes, taken on different days, in the same clip. And I've had the opposite situation where one continous 5 minute video section was split into two clips. That may have been because of something I did during recording.

But the bottom line is, I don't completely trust the automatic scene detection algorithms which work, I think, by detecting a scene change or a timecode change or both. They work for the most part but it's nice to have another tool around for those times when they don't.

DV Date worked perfectly for my needs. But I did learn that if you apply any video effects to your movie, MS will not retain the DTS when it renders the timeline to AVI (this must be the warning on the vDTS page was referring to). I tested that theory with vDTS and DV Date and neither could retrieve the DTS -- the data is apparently lost forever in that scenario.

- when capturing a tape with a gap in the timecode (a piece of nothing between two recordings) will indeed combine the two adjacent clips into one, along with some (harmless) dropped frames.
Since this will happen only now and then (especially when taking this into account when filming), it is no big deal for me.
- when captured to one long avi file: you can split the file afterwards with "Scenalizer", a free tool by Matrix corporation (don't know where to find it at the moment). It also produces a simple .txt file with all time code.
- to preserve DTS info produced by the capture module of MS, you save the info with the according tape name into a separate 'sfvidcap', file. Simply choose file-save within the capturing module.
- when rendering, MS produces a new DTS stream, as one string through the complete file. DTS holds info of the production date in that case. Some other applications, like Pinnacle Studio, will preserve in some cases original DTS info, but that will lead to a mess, because not allways original info is available (f.i. when applying transitions, this is new material, and will have new DTS info).

Bart

Bart,

I agree, item 1, no big deal as it only happens now and then.

Thanks for the Scenalizer tip. I'll Google it.

Yes, you can save the project under a different name, but if the clips are moved to different location on disk, you cannot re-associate the saved sfvidcap with the clips. The sfvidcap file expects to find the clips in the 'clip bin' (which as near as I can tell is a virtual folder, not a real folder on the disk). You cannot capture to the clip bin, then save the project under a different name and move those clips to a different location and have MS put the two back together. For example, I capture to "E:/tapes". I saved the project to my desktop, moved the clip to the desktop, and deleted the clip from the clip bin. The project file on my desktop still expected to find the clip in the clip bin.

I was able to get MS to preserve the DTS after it rendered to a new AVI, but only if I didn't apply any video FX's to it. Bottom line, get the DTS before you alter the original video or you may lose it forever.

Thanks Bart...