Is there a reason for this? Do any of the editors support the ability to read in the DV date/time info and display it with the video while editing? I can't believe I'm alone in needing this ability, but apparently so, since it's so hard to come by.

Turn on the data display on your camera or deck and then capture,,, of cource you may have other data on the screen as well ,iris,fstop ,light meter etc,depending on what camera the footage was shot on. The date/time is on a data region of the tape with other info-----I Think

You might wish to go to the Sonic Foundry "Suggestion" line and make this suggestion. It has been made before, but when more people ask for it, it is more likely that this feature will be added:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/support/productsuggestion.asp

Is there a reason for this? I don't know. None that I can think of.

Do any of the editors support the ability to read in the DV date/time info and display it with the video while editing? I haven't seen one that does.

I can't believe I'm alone in needing this ability, but apparently so, since it's so hard to come by. No you are not. There have been several times when I would have found it useful. Vegas can already display the timecode so one wouldn't think adding a Date/Time option would be overly difficult to do.

If you capture DV with Vidcap 4, you'll be able to see the DV date/time stamp in the Vegas 4 media pool.

So why can't the "timecode" Video FX show it?

I use DVRaptor capture and the time/date info is shown in its info file (I love that). When I use VV4 I usually render back to DVRaptor DV files and they lose this all important file info, showing only that days edit time and date.

However, to be fair, if you edit in Premiere it will do the same. I mean once you edit shots from different days, cameras, etc, how is all that file info going to be able to be stored anyway?

More and more people are asking that same question, hence the suggestion that you make the suggestion at SoFo's suggestion site. Thats just a suggestion, mind you.

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/support/productsuggestion.asp

Not only do people want to be able to SEE the time AND date codes on the timeline, but they want them to be preserved on the output DV. Both visible (showing during playback) and not, they want the original timecodes preserved.

"So why can't the "timecode" Video FX show it?"

Because date/time stamp isn't timecode.

We have added "burn date time stamp onto video" to the wish list for the next Vegas rev.

Final Answer:

Sure enough, if you do a Video Capture with Sonic 4 and then click on the resultant clips in the media pool, it will show you the original starting DV date and time stamp for that clip. This isn't perfect -- would be nice to have it automatically name the files/clips with the date/time stamp (along with whatever naming you want to apply via a naming template), but this will suffice for now. Would also be nice to view on the tracks as you move clips up for editing.

New Question:

I'm still considering Scenalyzer because of its ability to auto-name the files/clips. Would I be losing any particular functionality, quality, or anything else by using Scenalyzer to suck in the DV tape and then loading the tapes into Vegas 4.0's media pool to work with?

Would I be losing any particular functionality, quality, or anything else by using Scenalyzer to suck in the DV tape and then loading the tapes into Vegas 4.0's media pool to work with?

No - except for manually entered batch capture. I use Scenalyzer when I need to capture audio channels 3/4.

Hmmmm, not sure what you mean by that, seems like they both do (what I think of as) batch capture -- they split up the tape into chapters based on date/time changes -- what would I be having to do manually with scenalyzer?

DV acquisition from camera to PC is a file transfer technique.
The DV data is wrapped with an AVI header indicating what is inside.
I believe that no issues have been mentioned on 3rd party tools.
DV type 1 and 2 still have the same data, just alter the method for interleaving the audio, AFAIK.

With Scenalyzer, you cannot say "capture from 1:23:05 to 22:12:15". In Vegas you can. That's batch capture - you manually specify where to start and stop capturing. Scenalyzer will list the date/time breaks on a tape and let you capture sections - you just can't specify parts of sections.

Interesting, some of this video editing terminology is really strange. "Batch"ing in computers usually means doing many tasks at once, with no user intervention. Originated from creating a "batch" of different punch-card tasks that would all get run at once, in one batch. Counterintuitive to me to have it mean taking one specific thing out.

It still means that. You don't really batch capture unless you've defined several in/out points. Then you can capture them all at once without further intervention. You can also just type in a single set of in/out points and capture immediately without batching them. I do this routinely off my log sheets.