It doesn't work in versions 9 and 10 either.

Clicking on the heading merely reverses the order without sorting.

The best thing is to re-transfer your tapes using HDVSplit. It names each clip according to date/time. You can then sort on the name heading.
http://strony.aster.pl/paviko/

Be sure to keep the arbitrary first field in the name the same.

I just tried it in Vegas 10.0e and I can't even get the Date/Time Stamp to appear with my AVCHD files from a CX700V Sony camcorder.

So, I'm one bug away from being able to confirm your bug.

No, the date/time is not embedded in some (all?) AVCHD files. The OP was apparently talking about HDV from tape.

When I transfer my Sony AVCHD using PMB (supplied utility) the clips get named according to shooting date-time. I can then easily sort chronologically by numerical sort of the file name.

There is a sidecar .modd file that is also produced during transfer. It is in XML and has a field called DateTimeOriginal, but it is in a funny format. A file named 20100110132135 (2010/01/10 13:21:35) corresponds to 40188.556655092594000 in the .modd file.

I presume PMB is not written by SCS, but even so you would expect them to expoit the .modd file.

This thread reminds me of something I've asked for since Vegas 4, namely the ability to have access, via an fX, to ALL the line 21 information in DV files, and also now the additional information embedded in HD files. It would have been great, for instance, to be able to put a running clock on my Olympic Marathon Trials footage. If I had an fX that could read the date/time stamp, I could have derived an offset from that and displayed it on screen, when I wanted. The video also has GPS information, all sorts of camera settings data, and more.

Having such information would make it much easier to deal with multiple cameras because, if you set the date/time reasonably close, you could get the clips aligned within a few dozen frames when preparing to do a multi-cam edit (although I guess Plural Eyes reduces the need for this).

Anyway, it is a request I made many times and, like pretty much all my requests, it didn't line up with the direction SCS wanted to take the product.

Oh well ...

Back on the OP's problem. I just put some HDV from my FX1 on the timeline in Vegas 10.0e. This time I did get information in the date/time stamp column in the Project Media area. What's more, when I clicked on the heading column, everything sorted according to the date/time stamp.

So, in the above situation, Vegas did what was expected and I was not able to duplicate the problem.

[edit]The video was captured, live, using Vegas 7.0d. (By "live," I mean that while I was capturing to tape in my FX1, I was also simultaneously capturing to my laptop, via Firewire, with Vegas 7.0d as the capture application). I'm not sure that this matters, although I mention it because HDV Split most definitely captures HDV in a different manner than Vegas. This seems odd because a tape "capture" is supposed to be a bit-for-bit transfer from the tape and therefore unaltered. However, back in the Vegas 7 days, I found that HDV captured from HDV Split would be recognized differently by Vegas than the same tape captured by Vegas itself. The difference was incredibly important because the HDV Split HDV video was played back by a MainConcept MPEG-2 decoder whereas the Vegas-captured video was played back by Vegas' own internal decoder which was optimized to play back at a MUCH faster speed. The differences were not subtle.

Now, I think that behavior may no longer exist (I haven't checked it for years), but perhaps there are still subtle differences, and perhaps this might be one of them.

So the question is: which application was used to capture this HDV? And, are you sure?

Maybe Sony should acquire HDV Split?

"Maybe Sony should acquire HDV Split?"

YES - could not agree more !!!! Probably wouldn't be too expensive for them either...

Christian

"when I clicked on the heading column, everything sorted according to the date/time stamp"

Presumptious of me of course, but I have to ask. Did you load the clips onto the timeline in random chronological order before you tried sorting?

"which application was used to capture this HDV?"

I only use HDVSplit for HDV.

I was just playing with 10e 32 bit (64 bit Win 7). If the Date/time heading has been selected prior to loading clips, the clips will get sorted as they are loaded, ALMOST!

I noticed this before while I was playing around. Sometimes the third last item is in the second last position and vice versa. Pressing the heading reverses the list order and pressing it again restores the order, but correctly this time. Two more presses, and the second and third last items switch around again!

You all are far better than me if you can find a pattern to the resorting ... I sure can't. I've got clips all over the place getting ordered in all kinds of order. I think I'll just go with the HDV Split route - sounds a lot easier. It seems weird, though - the proper date/time coding was clearly imported along with the clip as I see it on the screen - why can't it properly sort on that particular field ?

This thread got me wondering, and when I Googled the problem I saw posts on various forums going back to 2007 about the same issue of time/date sorting. On the sites I checked, it had never been resolved. Maybe it hasn't been addressed to SCS support yet?

Presumptious of me of course, but I have to ask. Did you load the clips onto the timeline in random chronological order before you tried sorting?I went out of my way to put them on the timeline, one at a time, in completely random order, because that's what you said led you to discover this problem in the first place. The clips were numbered in chronological order, but I put 0901 then 0822, then 0930, then 0855, etc.

I only use HDVSplit for HDV.Hmmm....

Well, as I said in my long post above, I am 100% certain, because I test it extensively, that Vegas treated differently HDV captured by HDV Split than HDV that was captured by the Sony capture application. Back in earlier versions, if you right-clicked on an HDV clip in Explorer window within Vegas, and then scrolled down to the bottom of the File Properties dialog, you would see the final section labled "Plug-in." The name of the plug-in for Sony-captured video was m2tsplug.dll.

You can learn more if you click on this old thread:

Z1 cam / P4 3.0 workflow...?

and then scroll down to my post.

I don't know if this could cause your problem or not, but since everything works fine for me, and all my clips were captured with Vegas, I open it up as a possibility that you might want to test. As you will see from the above link, back then, Vegas treated the clips in such a different way that playback performance was completely different.

This does not deal directly with the purpose of this thread...but in case some of you don't know about this very useful utility...
I have it and it works as fully described...giving you total access to the embedded time/date information as well GPS , exposure, and gamma of most HDV or AVCHD footage.

the website is: http://www.dvmp.co.uk/

John M, I remember you saying before that your HDV files captured with HDV Split were treated differently from those captured by Vegas, and that they were in some way handicapped. Personally I have never found that to be the case. They have always been at least as responsive. This is across V8 and V10 on 2 or 3 different computers (maybe V7 too). And, as far as I remember, they reported the same decoder as the Vegas-captured clips. My camera is a Z1.

re: dvmp

I came across that just yesterday when I was looking to find a way to use some of the data embedded in my AVCHD files. I haven't yet downloaded the demo, but you are encouraging me to do so, since you say that it does work.

Quick question: have you used the Export Subtitles feature? To me, this seems like the best way to use the information, namely export the data to a subtitle file, and then let the user turn that on and off during playback.

I will still need to figure out how to use the information to generate an on-screen clock that is slaved to the date/time field. This would be a really nifty fX. I've not yet developed an fX, and I don't know how big a step this might be. I'm not sure I have the time ....

John M, I remember you saying before that your HDV files captured with HDV Split were treated differently from those captured by Vegas, and that they were in some way handicappedNick,

Do you have a relatively small HDV file, captured with HDV Split, that you could upload? I can test it and re-confirm what I wrote in that old thread I linked to above.

Back then, I did a LOT of testing, and also still had the ear of one or two developers at SCS. I just checked, and when I was beta testing -- I think it was Vegas 7 -- back in December 2006, I had a lengthy exchange with the development team. Back then (and this could have been long-since updated and fixed) any HDV file had to "conform" to certain specifications in order for the internal Sony mts decoder to handle the file. If it was able to handle the file, you got really good native HDV playback speed (the initial HDV playback speed was pretty slow, and so back then, most people were creating Cineform intermediates, and editing with those). If you captured with HDV Split or any other non-Sony capture application, the files were generally rejected by the Sony decoder, and the much slower, although more general MainConcept decoder was used instead.

I am pretty certain that Vegas 7.x still had this behavior, but I'm not certain. That's why I'd like to get a small HDV file captured with HDV Split.

To johnmeyer re dvmp Pro5 post

The software design of this product has been designed around a few select purposes - some of which can be accessed by an adept programmer to get even better value out of it.

Hence, export subtitles works and it works really well if you use a subtitle product -like subtitle workshop for example- the tweaks added by a competent programmer would be truly amazing to create interfaces with this for other products like DVD Acrchitect.

The software design of this product has been designed around a few select purposes - some of which can be accessed by an adept programmer to get even better value out of it.Thanks for that. Very interesting. I hope I get a chance to play with this sometime in the next few days.

I have always been able to sort by files in the Project media window (Details View) as sequencing is important on my projects. I use a Canon camera and generate mts fiilesand they all have a date/time stamp...Have you setup the proper data/time in your camera?.....another trick I use for other work I do is using a bulk renaming utility I found years ago....this has saved me lots of time in many projects. take a look: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php .

PS..I am using Vegas 11.

Let me second the bulk rename utility recommendation. I found out about it several years ago in this forum and, after testing out the trial, I purchased it. I have found it to be absolutely amazing. And, if you really want to get into it, you can do search and replace using regular expressions. Three that I wrote, and use all the time, are these:

Delete everything between brackets

Re-order date to put year first (mmddyy to yymmdd)

Swap first two words in file name

The simple stuff, like search and replace, appending to beginning and end of file name, and case conversions, it does without any effort whatsoever.

This is one of my five favorite shareware programs.