Date timecode info??

dpriest · Post by **dpriest** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 3:38 am

I recently captured video from a mini dv cassette and saved it as an mpeg 2 file. When I open the file then edit it etc. I would like to see the date of a specific section of the video file so I can then add appropriate text. Or I would like to date stamp the beginning of a scene. I was wondering how to do this either with vs10+ or vs11+

Thanks for your help in advance.

Post by **lancecarr** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 3:50 am

If you go to the General Information section here: http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewforum.php?f=31
scroll through to the Free Stuff and you will find some programs that will do it for you.
In digital media the Date/ Time is part of the program stream and requires a purpose built software to display it.

I think the one you are looking for is DVDate or even DV Timestamp.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 4:17 am

If you don't want to have the date and time on the actual video, you can just hover your mouse over a clip and time and date will be displayed in a text box.

dpriest · Post by **dpriest** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:29 pm

All I want to do is to be able to display the date, so I can then add it on my own. I have one mpeg clip that is one hour long. I dragged and dropped the video clip in vs11. As I dragged the mouse over the clip, I did not see a text box display the date. Also this clip is a product of several different dates from recording with my camcorder. I am going to split these into smaller clips, and then add special transitions. Will each split clip be able to display the proper date as well? I tried getting the date do display both in the storyboard view and timeline view, but no luck.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:40 pm

I still find (just checked again with a recently captured video originally filmed in Belgium in March) that the various, split DV files I captured with VS11+ (but the same with those captured in VS10+ as well), that when I hover my mouse over the original captured DV files (the format in which they were captured from a mini DV camera), then I get the date and time of original filming shown in the text box. The time is off in the sense that the camera is set to Australian Eastern Standard Time and I did not change that when I went to Europe. But it is otherwise accurate and I just have to mentally adjust for the difference of time between Australia and Europe..

I would like to be able to say that this is caused by the fact that I normally do what the pros do and play my new DV cassettes through the camera with the lens cap on, to lay down a time code on the whole tape I normally do that. But in this case, I was in Europe and had bought new tape and did not have time to do it. But the hovered time code still appears and is accurate.

Are you talking about a mini DV camera or something else? -- Hopefully someone else will be able to comment as to whether a mini DVD, hard disc or HD camera does the same thing as the mini DV ones...

dpriest · Post by **dpriest** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:49 pm

First off, I wish I could say that I was in Australia taking video, instead of Connecticut. I have the Panasonic pvgs500 minidv camcorder. I am using vs11 to capture the video and am saving it as an mpeg2 file, instead of an avi file. I am doing this, because I read and article that recommended capturing in this format to avoid a very long process to transcode an avi file to mpeg2. My PC has a P4 3.4ghz processor with 2GB DDR2 RAM and plenty of hard drive space. Do I need an avi file to display the date with the mouse?

GeorgeW · Post by **GeorgeW** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:53 pm

Capturing from DV directly to mpeg2 is probably why you don't see the date/time. Try capturing a small test DV clip as DV .avi to see the difference...

Regards,
George

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:55 pm

Or do it the easy way:
Just open Preferences in VS11, and in the General tab, there is a checkbox called: "Display DV timecode on Preview Window". That is the most convenielt way I know. It displays in the preview window, but does not appear in the final, rendered movie.

EDIT: Whoops. I failed to see the MPEG2 part of the first post.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 3:07 pm

dpriest -- this only regards your capturing to mpeg-2. Sorry, but it is idiocy to start with DV format and capture to mpeg-2 just to save a bit of time. Video editing is, as I am sure you have found, an incredibly time consuming job, and for most of us, the objective is to maintain quality rather than save time. It's good that your computer is fast enough to capture direct to mpeg-2. Mine does as well. But I still don't do it just to save the extra half hour or even longer.

For what it is worth, by the way, I have a computer which is a bit less well resourced than yours (see my system button), and I find that rendering an edited DV file will normally take me about 1.25 times real time. In other words, for a one hour project in DV, it will take around 1 hour 10 to 15 minutes to render that 1 hour project to DVD compatible mpeg-2.

Capturing to DV format maintains the high quality DV format of your original tape. In effect you are not capturing, but merely transferring the tape to your hard drive (unlike capturing to mpeg-2 which is incredibly demanding on computer resources, and causes many users' computers simply to hang). DV format is moreover essentially not lossy in editing and re-encoding. So capturing in it, doing your edits in it and even, if necessary, re-encoding parts of it in the same format entail no loss of quality. It is also a format precisely designed to be edited.

The same cannot be said for mpeg-2. Yes, it might be the format required to burn a DVD eventually. But it is *not* a format designed to be edited, even though, obviously, it can be. But the worst aspect is that it is several times more compressed than DV and moreover uses algorithms which make it a lossy format every time it is rendered. OK, you can minimise the number of times it needs to be rendered, and Video Studio has SmartRender which means only edited parts are re-rendered.

But one of the dangers, which many users face and have definitely experienced over and over, is that editing mpeg-2, whether standard definition, and worse, High Definition, often opens up serious problems, particularly associated with out of sync video and audio.

This is the basic reason why we continue to recommend to people with a mini DV camera, to capture and edit in that format, and only convert to mpeg-2 after all editing has been completed.

dpriest · Post by **dpriest** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 3:15 pm

I did capture in AVI and it does display the date. But it appears the clip I have to point the cursor over is in the upper right side of the screen, just to the right of the big playback window. If I point the cursor over the clip at the bottom of the screen, I get no information. The challenge this poses is that I have an hour long avi clip that I will capture with several different record dates on it. How am I able to see the information of the different dates?

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 3:22 pm

I am afraid that is a limitation of the program -- unless someone else can suggest a trick that I am unaware of, which is eminently possible!!

dpriest · Post by **dpriest** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 3:30 pm

Actually, what George said is what did the trick. If I check the box to display dv time info, then when I play the avi file, it displays the info.

But now it takes a bloody long time to transcode my project to Mpeg2 file. Is there anyway to speed this up?

Post by **Ron P.** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 4:35 pm

dpriest wrote: But now it takes a bloody long time to transcode my project to Mpeg2 file. Is there anyway to speed this up?

Get a much, more powerful system, dedicated to editing/encoding video, set up a special video editing hardware profile, where the only processes running are those absolutely necessary for video editing. Other then that, nope there's not.

GeorgeW · Post by **GeorgeW** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 11:17 pm

dpriest wrote:I did capture in AVI and it does display the date. But it appears the clip I have to point the cursor over is in the upper right side of the screen, just to the right of the big playback window. If I point the cursor over the clip at the bottom of the screen, I get no information. The challenge this poses is that I have an hour long avi clip that I will capture with several different record dates on it. How am I able to see the information of the different dates?

This might be helpful (depends on how you edit).

In the Popup Window that lets you Explore your folders for the video clip, when you select the clip, you can hit the SCENES button (lower right side of the popup window). This will separate the video into virtual "clips" (they aren't really separated from the original single clip). You can then play them with the date/time code showing. This allows you to easily identify the start of a new recording date/time.

If you open them to a video folder, hovering the mouse on them does not appear to give you the date/time for the start of each section (I wish it did). It just gives you the date/time of the first recording...

Regards,
George