Kent,

I think the problem is that Sonic Foundry's Video Capture utility does not extract the day/date information from the DV tape and insert it in the Creation Date tag field of the AVI header.

In fact, I have done a little research and found that the SoFo Video Capture utility puts very little information into the AVI header fields. Obviously not all of the information needed to fill in all of the fields and tags of the AVI header is available directly from a DV tape. But at least the Creation Date data that you and I need could be extracted and placed. And the Video Capture utility could open a dialog to prompt us to enter additional data into the AVI header data tag fields at the time of the capture.

The AVI header primary tags are: Title, Director, Copyright, Product, Creation Date, Genre, Genre2, Subject, Keywords, and Comments. Of those primary tags, Video Capture fills in only the Title tag.

The Video Capture utility does fill in the Short AVI Information fields: File name, File Size, Length, Compression, Video Stream, and Audio Stream. It makes no attempt to fill in any of the Movie Credits fields, but of course it would have to prompt the user to supply that information because none of it is available from the DV tape itself. The AVI header Movie Credits fields are such items as: Written By, Produced By, Edited By, Costume Design, Music By, Production, Distributed By, etc.

I have had difficulties using my captured AVI files in programs other than Vegas Video and in an effort to resolve those difficulties I have used a demo of the abcAVI Tag Editor, a shareware program, to examine my AVI files. For more info on the abcAVI Tag Editor, see:

abcAVI Tag Editor home page

There is an upside to having to manually extract the day/date information from the camcorder. When you manually insert that information in your Vegas project, you have complete creative control over how the day/date information is presented. Of course, if that information had been included in the AVI clip header you could simply type in a tag such as <day> or <date> that would automatically retrieve and insert that information, as many text editors and word processors do now. That would give us creative control and convenience. Maybe we can ask for that in Vegas 5.

-- Seeker --