Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/28/2005, 2:08 PM
Old thread:

Is it possible to read all media properties?
2G wrote on 2/28/2005, 3:44 PM
John,

Thanks for the reference. Not good news. And that thread was kinda left hanging.

AVI is a public format, right? I understand that Vegas may be using a free format field that is someone non-standard in the header to put the time stamp. That's fine. I've extracted worse. If you or someone could point me to a general AVI wrapper/header structure, I'll figure out how to get the timestamp out of it.

This could be INCREDIBLY useful information for automating multicam sync, etc. Granted, the camera clocks would need to be in relatively good sync. But just being able to get all the clips from a 5-cam shoot in sync where all the cameras were stopped and started several times could be reduced from an all day job to a script plus some tweaking. I gotta figure out how to get that info out!!

Thanks again.

2G
Marco. wrote on 3/1/2005, 3:13 PM
Sync cams the way you described - using the timecode information - is already realized in the Veggie Toolkit, a scripting tool for Vegas.

Marco
2G wrote on 4/18/2005, 1:54 PM
No offense to Veggie Toolkit. But at this time I don't need all of the functions available in it. Pluse I have several other scripts where I want to use the camera time stamp from a clip. I simply want to get the camera timestamp from an AVI.

If Veggie Toolkit can get to the camera time info in the AVI, is Sony providing private APIs available only to certain vendors? Or did Veggie reverse engineer the AVI file to extract the info? I would think AVI file formats are not proprietary.

2G
rcampbel wrote on 4/19/2005, 4:32 PM
The Veggie Toolkit can't get the date/time stamp from an AVI file. As stated, that is unfortunately not available via the scripting API. I do read and use the timecode info, but that is different from the date/time stamp.

One could read the AVI file directly, but I have not written any code to do so. Sorry.

Randall
2G wrote on 4/20/2005, 3:38 PM
Randall,

I'm confused. Are you the writer of the Veggie Toolkit? An earlier append said that it can sync up multicam clips based on camera timecode. But you are saying you can't get to camera timecode (??).

Was the earlier post incorrect about Veggie Toolkit providing what I was asking for?
rcampbel wrote on 4/20/2005, 8:04 PM
Yes, I am the author of the Veggie Toolkit.

I may be misunderstanding the question, but it appeared that you wanted to access the date/time stamp information in a captured DV AVI file. The date/time stamp contains the date and time (e.g. 04/16/2005 10:22:32) as set by the user of the camera. This information is NOT available to the scripting API. One would have to read the AVI file directly and the Veggie Toolkit does NOT do this.

The other time information in a DV AVI file is the timecode. Timecode is the number of hours, minutes, seconds, and frames (e.g. 00:12:13;22) from the beginning of the tape (or the point at which the timecode was set). This information IS available in the scripting API and the Veggie Toolkit Media Sync tool can use this info to sync events together on the Vegas timeline.

So, depending upon which you are looking for the answer is either No or Yes.

If what you are looking for is a multi-camera sync tool, then the most extensive one is Excalibur 4 by Edward Troxel. Veggie Toolkit does provide some of this function, but Excalibur is much more advanced.

Randall
johnmeyer wrote on 4/20/2005, 9:29 PM
The lack of ability to get at this (date/time infor) and other information in a DV file has long frustrated me as well.

Here is an insteresting link that might give you ideas of things you could do using currently available software:

Datecode Software

It seems to me that what could work pretty well would be to use the "DVInfo" AVISynth plug-in to create an AVI file that is all black, but with the date-time info in it. You would then place this on the track above your video and use Vegas to composite the information onto your video wherever you wanted it to appear.

An even better solution would be to feed this information into a subtitle file and then import it into DVDA where it could be turned on and off at "runtime" when you view the video. If the DVInfo AVISynth plugin works as advertised, the subtitle file should be trivial to generate, and given how fast AVISynth works, one should be able to generate the requred file pretty quickly.

Just some thoughts ...

[Edit]

After I wrote the above, I looked around a little more, and there are all sorts of little utilities that will write a subtitle file that contains the DV date and time information, updated at whatever interval you wish. I downloaded this one:

DV Subtitles

opened a DV AVIFile and generated a TXT file that imported easily into DVDA 3.0. It worked fine without any work on my part, although the formatting was pretty crude. Anyway, it satisfied me (proof of concept) that the idea is valid, and that if it could be incorporated into the Vegas workflow, it would be extremely useful.