metadata on videos?

[carlseibert]

Hi,

I am seeing metadata written on video files by Photo Mechanic not appear in other programs and vice-versa.  In other words, captions written by PM will not appear in Bridge or Daminion, for example. I have seen this on both .MOV and .MP4 files.

Metadata written by either of those two programs is visible to the other.  Photo Mechanic seems to be the odd man out.  (I don't have any other programs on board that can write captions to video file except other flavors of Adobe products.)

What gives?

-Carl

This on Photo Mechanic Version 5.0, build 16960 (6ba2289), Mac OS 10.10.5 on MacBookPro.

[Kirk Baker]

Carl,

I am seeing metadata written on video files by Photo Mechanic not appear in other programs and vice-versa.  In other words, captions written by PM will not appear in Bridge or Daminion, for example. I have seen this on both .MOV and .MP4 files.

Metadata written by either of those two programs is visible to the other.  Photo Mechanic seems to be the odd man out.  (I don't have any other programs on board that can write captions to video file except other flavors of Adobe products.)

What gives?

Photo Mechanic reads and writes metadata for videos via XMP sidecar files.

-Kirk

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

I was just playing around with this myself.  I added metadata in Photo Mechanic to an MP4 shot from a GoPro. Bridge does not see any metadata for the file even though it has an XMP sidecar, and does not even allow me to edit any metadata for the file at all (File Info is greyed out) .   

Then I added metadata (with PM) to a .MOV shot with a Fuji camera.  Bridge did not see that metadata sidecar either, but I was able to go into Bridge's "File Info" dialog and "Import" the XMP data from the sidecar into the video file itself.  I did about 20 minutes of searching and couldn't find out how Bridge is supposed to handle XMP sidecar files for videos, but it looks to me like it totally ignores them. (Even though Adobe's own Help says that sidecar files are legit for XMP https://helpx.adobe.com/bridge/using/metadata-adobe-bridge.html)

I read that Daminion should be able to read from sidecars, but I don't have it so I can't suggest how to get that to happen. 

-Mick

[carlseibert]

Hi.

Sorry for necro-bumping my own thread. I was bitten by a little problem with my email notification settings on this forum. (Like not updating my email address. My bad.)

So as horribly all over the place as metadata standards are for photos, apparently, they are more horribly all over the place for video at this point.

I guess the biggest worry is whether the metadata will travel with the file, particularly when it's ingested into a DAM, and then back out again. The glass-half-full view is that the data will be there (at least if it was input through PM) and the DAM vendor should be able to parse it, and the glass-half-full-of-what-exactly view is that there are 400 DAM vendors and it's probably not a good idea to hold my breath while waiting.

Would both embedding the data AND writing it to a sidecar be a reasonable strategy?

[Kirk Baker]

I guess the biggest worry is whether the metadata will travel with the file, particularly when it's ingested into a DAM, and then back out again. The glass-half-full view is that the data will be there (at least if it was input through PM) and the DAM vendor should be able to parse it, and the glass-half-full-of-what-exactly view is that there are 400 DAM vendors and it's probably not a good idea to hold my breath while waiting.

Would both embedding the data AND writing it to a sidecar be a reasonable strategy?

That would cover all of the bases, but you'll have to make sure that both sets of data are kept in sync.  PM won't embed metadata in movies, nor will it update existing embedded metadata.

-Kirk