Syncing Star Ratings between Photo Mechanic and Bridge (and other Adobe apps)

[johnha]

I just came off a video shoot where I was using Photo Mechanic to ingest DSLR video files (Canon 5D3 and Nikon D800). I was using star ratings on the video files and realized they were not syncing with Adobe Bridge.

I know that with the default settings, the star ratings sync with Bridge for still images. But I discovered that the stars don't sync with video files.

I reached out to the PM twitter account and the guess was that Bridge (and Premiere and Prelude) write the star ratings directly into the video files, but PM writes this information out to a sidecar file for speed reasons.

It would be great if you could add a setting into PM to allow for writing star ratings and other metadata directly into video files. Currently there are no metadata options that I can see for video files, just stills.

Thank you!
John

[Kirk Baker]

John,

I just came off a video shoot where I was using Photo Mechanic to ingest DSLR video files (Canon 5D3 and Nikon D800). I was using star ratings on the video files and realized they were not syncing with Adobe Bridge.

I know that with the default settings, the star ratings sync with Bridge for still images. But I discovered that the stars don't sync with video files.

I reached out to the PM twitter account and the guess was that Bridge (and Premiere and Prelude) write the star ratings directly into the video files, but PM writes this information out to a sidecar file for speed reasons.

It would be great if you could add a setting into PM to allow for writing star ratings and other metadata directly into video files. Currently there are no metadata options that I can see for video files, just stills.

There is another reason for not modifying the video file to insert metadata besides speed: backups.  Each time a file is modified, no matter how slight the modification, backup software will think that it needs to backup the file.  Some backup software apps are smart and will only backup a list of deltas for a file, but many don't and will backup the entire file just because a single byte changed.  By using XMP sidecar files, only the sidecar file is backed up, no matter how well designed the backup software is.

I can understand why video editing apps insert the data since they're likely adding sound tracks and cutting/rearranging frames so why not embed the metadata while you're at it.

-Kirk