Bulk Edit Time metadata on Video Files

[therock003]

My Camera wasnt set up correctly and time was on 2000 Jan 01. How can i offset each file and have the time stored correctly on the video files timestamps? So lets say i calculate the time diference and i find its 26 years + some months + some day etc. How do i go about adding this differential to each file with one click

[cholla]

I did a search for this & exiftool & ffmpeg were suggested.
I'm not sure if they can be used as batch for this.

It also depends on which type timestamp.
The ones that come up in Windows properties ?
Or burned in visible timestamps on the video itself.

I do not know a program that can do this with the second kind of timestamps.

[therock003]

No I mean inside the file properties. Creation date modified date etc

[cholla]

If you want to change both use ffmpeg first.

If you want to change the metadata that MediaInfo detects with ffmpeg then:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -metadata creation_time=2012-12-17T21:30:00Z output.mp4

I'm not good with script to do batch files but with this ffmpeg code you or someone should be able to.


This tool should do what you want:
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bulk_file_changer.html
The above program is supposed to do batch or bulk but I only tested with one video file.

[fred_abila]

exiftool can do the whole batch with a fixed offset in one command, so you don't need to set each file's date by hand. The shift syntax is "+=Y:M h:m". For example, to add 26 years, 3 months and 14 days to every MP4/MOV in a folder:

exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC "-QuickTime:CreateDate+=26:3:14 0:0:0" "-QuickTime:ModifyDate+=26:3:14 0:0:0" "-QuickTime:TrackCreateDate+=26:3:14 0:0:0" "-QuickTime:TrackModifyDate+=26:3:14 0:0:0" "-QuickTime:MediaCreateDate+=26:3:14 0:0:0" "-QuickTime:MediaModifyDate+=26:3:14 0:0:0" -ext mp4 -ext mov "D:\Videos\Camera"

Then copy the corrected date into the Windows file dates, which is what Explorer's "Date created" and "Date modified" columns show:

exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC "-FileCreateDate<QuickTime:CreateDate" "-FileModifyDate<QuickTime:CreateDate" -ext mp4 -ext mov "D:\Videos\Camera"

A few things to watch:
- Work out the exact offset from one clip whose real date and time you know, and put the hours and minutes in too if they're off.
- QuickTime dates are supposed to be stored in UTC. -api QuickTimeUTC makes exiftool convert to your local time. If the result is off by your time-zone offset, run it again without that option.
- exiftool keeps a backup of each file as *_original. Check a few clips first, then delete the backups or add -overwrite_original next time.
- If the camera wrote AVCHD .MTS files, exiftool can't write those. Remux them to MP4 first, or just fix the file dates with Bulk File Changer as cholla suggested.