Capture DV from Sony Handicam and preserve timestamps

[eswenson]

I have about 50 mini-DV tapes I'm trying to convert to MP4 files using a Sony Handicam PCR-120 as the source, and WinDV on a Win7 PC as the capture program. The trouble is that all the date/time codes that I can see displayed on the LCD screen of the camcorder are not showing up in the WinDV preview window, nor in the resulting DV-AVI files captured by WinDV. And, of course, when I compress these DV-AVI files using h264/faac, I also don't see the date/time. I'm concerned that years from now, when memories are bad, knowing when these scenes were created will be impossible.

Is there any way I can coerce the date/time image that appears on the LCD screen to make it through to the captured video? I've already looked at the manual for this camcorder and tried the various settings that seemed reasonable, to no avail.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. -- Eric

[aedipuss]

you can just leave them named as winDV writes them as that is the starting time code. another option is to get the enosoft program that allows the stamps to be written into video.

http://www.enosoft.net/products/enodvdec/enodvdec.htm

[eswenson]

Thanks. I do keep the start/end dates of the tapes in the filenames, but I was interested in the specific date/times of the various scenes. Some of these tapes span several months, and the actual date/times would be useful. I'm taking a look at enodvdec program now (trial). Thanks for the pointer. I take it that WinDV throws this information away then. I'm hoping that enodvdec will add a separate stream to the AVI file so that the date/time information can be turned on/off via the subtitle or similar capability of the rendering software.

[Gavino]

I take it that WinDV throws this information away then.

No, the information is written to the AVI file as part of the standard DV data stream (not as a video overlay), and can be retrieved (and displayed) by suitable rendering software.

By contrast, the enosoft program encodes them into the video stream (and hence they cannot easily be switched off or removed).

[eswenson]

Can you provide me examples of suitable software that could do something with this data stream? Ideally, for me, that software could produce a separate video stream that could me encoded in my mp4 file (along with my h264 video and aac audio streams) such that I could turn on and off the display of the date/time when rendering the mp4.

[eswenson]

It seems I should be able to use

http://www.skydiver.de/stef/datecode_en.htm

to extract the datetime data from the dv-avi file and have it generate SSA files with this information. Apparently Handbrake can read these and generate a separate subtitle track from this. Haven't tried it yet though.

[eswenson]

Well, while the above program does produce .srt and .ssa files, I don't see how Handbrake can import the SSA files. It only appears to import the SRT files, and they don't appear to get emitted to the .mp4 files I'm producing. I tried with .mkv files and also didn't get the subtitles. So I still haven't figured out how to do what I want.

[nharikrishna]

I usd the EnoSoft program with MiniDV tapes. It did overlay the date & time code onto the capture videos. But the trouble I had with it is, it almost always dropped some frames (which was never the case on my machine using straight Firewire capture using WinDV or the other). Remember, EnoSoft is actually modifying your video while overlaying the date & time code, so some quality loss will be there. Also, Enosoft behaved erratically while capturing from Hi8 tapes by overlaying dates that were not consistent with the dates displayed in the camcorder. Otherwise it is an excellent program and FREE too. If your final output is a DVD, then I suggest extracting the date & time info as Subtitles and making them visible on the final DVD when the SUBTITLE button is pressed on the DVD Remote.

[Brad]

Well, while the above program does produce .srt and .ssa files, I don't see how Handbrake can import the SSA files. It only appears to import the SRT files, and they don't appear to get emitted to the .mp4 files I'm producing. I tried with .mkv files and also didn't get the subtitles. So I still haven't figured out how to do what I want.

SRT should be sufficient for timecodes since you don't need fancy color changes. Name the .SRT to the same base filename as the .AVI. Grab Media Player Classic Homecinema and playback the AVI. It should pick up the subs automatically and display them or give you the option to show them under the Subtitles menu.

I do this with closed captions converted to SRT.

[eswenson]

Thanks nharikrishna and vaporeon800. The trouble is this: my TV (Samsung) and BD player (Samsung) will only render .mp4 movies (mp4 or h.264 video, aac/mp3 audio). So what I'm trying to do is get my miniDV tapes converted to .mp4 files such that the datetime codes are superimposed on the video image -- preferably in such a way that I can turn them on and off, but if not possible, on all the time. The .SRT files produced by the http://www.skydiver.de/stef/datecode_en.htm would need to be converted to video and merged (burned) with the video stream. It doesn't look like Handbrake will do this. That datecode program does produce .ssa files, but Handbrake doesn't support them as input (I'm using version 0.9.5). I'd had no luck with the EnoSoft program so far and abandoned it. I'm told that ffmepgx can do what I want, but I only have a PC or Linux system to use for this purpose.

vaporeon800: your suggestion regarding .srt files and Media Player Classic Homecinema sounds good if I were wanting to play these movies on my PC -- but I need them in .mp4 files for my TV (so I can stream them to the TV or BD player).

Any other suggestions? It almost seems that avisynth could do this (perhaps using Avanti as a frontend) from what I've read. I haven't tried this option yet.

[eswenson]

I think I've found a solution, although it is a bit tedious:

1. Capture miniDV tape with WinDV. Result is .avi file.
2. Run dv_datecode on .avi file, with SSA output. Result is .ssa file.
3. Run VirtualDub on .avi file, select subtitler filter and .ssa file. Write out .avi file. Result is another .avi file with datetime superimposed.
4. Use Handbrake to compress .avi to .mp4

Of course, this doesn't give me a separate video stream. It might be possible to get VirtualDub to emit a separate .avi file (with only the datetime codes) and then use avisynth encode the two video streams separately in the output .mp4 file. But I'm not sure what my TV will do with an .mp4 file with multiple video streams -- probably ignore all but the first.

[Brad]

The MP4 format does support "soft" subtitles, but there's no guarantee that your TV or BD player bothered to implement that portion of the spec. Give it a try with YAMB/MP4Box. It will take .SRT and convert for you, though I'm not a fan of the fonts it defaults to. Of course, you will need to encode the video to MPEG-4 first to use as input to the MP4 multiplexer.

Remember to backup your original DV-AVI files if it's something you care about since those will always be the highest quality original stream.

[Gavino]

Any other suggestions? It almost seems that avisynth could do this

Avisynth has a plugin filter which extracts the DV timestamps from the AVI file and overlays the data as subtitles.
Plugin download (including docs): http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/files/dvinfo_20100602.zip
Discussion thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=61688

[eswenson]

vaporeon800: I tried using Handbrake to encode my DV-AVI file as an .mp4 file (h264/aac) and dv_datecode to extract the .SRT subtitles from the DV-AVI file. I then used YAMB/MP4Box to combine the .mp4 file and .srt file into another .mp4 file. The resulting .mp4 file renders in VLC and when the subtitle track is enabled, the date codes appear fine. My TV and BD player, alas, do not display the subtitles and do not allow me to turn them on. So it looks like I'd need to hard-burn the subtitles into the video track.

Gavino: I'll try avisynth. I was getting spoiled because the process of converting my 70-odd mini-DV tapes to .mp4 files is, without subtitles, a pretty easy task. (I use windv to get the dv from the camcorder to my windoz machine, and then Handbrake to get the dv-avi into an .mp4 (h264/aac). This is nice and quick. With avisynth, I have to create a script, and have it extract the video and audio tracks, and then when that is done, mux back the video and audio tracks into an .mp4 file. With subtitles, it will add another step or two, I think. But I'll give it a try.

I do have a soft-subtitle solution now that allows me to get the date time codes using VLC. I can probably live with this because if, when watching these .mp4 files 10 years down the line (!) I need to find out what date a scene came from, I can just load the .mp4 file on my machine and use vlc to see the subtitles -- that is, of course, if PCs, VLC, and MP4 aren't completely obsolete!

Anyway, I'll try out the avisynth solution. Thanks.

[2Bdecided]

Thanks. I do keep the start/end dates of the tapes in the filenames, but I was interested in the specific date/times of the various scenes.

Then set WinDV to split into separate files at scene boundaries. One scene per file, correctly labelled. Easy.

Cheers,
David.

[2Bdecided]

I usd the EnoSoft program with MiniDV tapes. It did overlay the date & time code onto the capture videos. But the trouble I had with it is, it almost always dropped some frames (which was never the case on my machine using straight Firewire capture using WinDV or the other).

the Enosoft software will act on files. So you can capture using WinDV, and then use EnoSoft to overlay the dates.

Also, Enosoft behaved erratically while capturing from Hi8 tapes by overlaying dates that were not consistent with the dates displayed in the camcorder.

The EnoSoft programme is reading DV metadata. The Hi8 tapes have no metadata and include the date (if any) burnt into the video stream only. If you capture through a DV camcorder, then the DV stream may include today's date. If you generate DV some other way, then they'll probably be no date. There's no way to get the dates from Hi8 into DV date metadata.

Cheers,
David.

[2Bdecided]

If you have two versions - the original without the date burnt in, and a copy with the date burnt in, then you can load both into your video editor, and cross fade between them (manually) to make the date appear at the start of each scene.

I think videos with the date permanently burnt into the video look horrible. Though it is annoying to have no record of when a video was shot. I always wrote on the analogue tapes (and burnt the date in, in the camcorder itself, at the start of each new day's footage).

Cheers,
David.

[nharikrishna]

Thanks David.

[eswenson]

Thanks. I do keep the start/end dates of the tapes in the filenames, but I was interested in the specific date/times of the various scenes.

Then set WinDV to split into separate files at scene boundaries. One scene per file, correctly labelled. Easy.

Well, I did have that at first. The problem is that with literally hundreds of scenes on these tapes, I have tons of .mp4 files which are unmanageable to keep track of and render.

I do have a solution right now that appears to work. I'm using avisynth with the dvinfo plugin. My pipeline is this: tape -> windv (produces dv-avi) -> m2gui/avisinth/dvinfo (produces .mp4 (h264/aac)).

The only unfortunate part of this process is that the avisinth process, using the M2GUI win32 frontend is a manual process. I need to find out some way of automating it. The process involves: 1. authoring an AVS script that specifies the AVI file, DVINFO plugin, and appropriate script commands; 2. using the MeGUI Input dialog to specify video source (the avs script), audio source (the avs script), separate output filenames (xxx.video.mp4 and xxx.audio.mp4) and enqueing the two video and audio process requests, 3. waiting until 2 is done so that I can use the MP4Muxer to mux the video and audio together into the final .mp4 file. I'm planning on writing a simply python script to generate the AVS file for a particular input .avi file, but I need to figure out how to encode the video and audio streams and mux the results together using a script rather than the MeGUI interface (I have too many tapes to do this manually).

[Brad]

You can grab x264 and the Nero AAC encoder, both of which are free CLI programs.

[ManUtdFans]

Thanks. I do keep the start/end dates of the tapes in the filenames, but I was interested in the specific date/times of the various scenes.

Then set WinDV to split into separate files at scene boundaries. One scene per file, correctly labelled. Easy.

Cheers,
David.

So are you saying we rename the file names?

[2Bdecided]

Thanks. I do keep the start/end dates of the tapes in the filenames, but I was interested in the specific date/times of the various scenes.

Then set WinDV to split into separate files at scene boundaries. One scene per file, correctly labelled. Easy.

So are you saying we rename the file names?

WinDV names the files using whatever date/time format you want.

e.g. mine is set to...

Capt. file: D:\video\dv\DV
Config: Date/time: %Y-%m-%d %H-%M.%S 079

Which would give
DV.2011-06-03 12-59.21 079.AVI

DV is the base filename. 079 is the tape number in this case, which I added manually to the template, and so gets added to every file name.

You can add descriptions if you want. You could even write a script to sort the files into folders based on date or year or whatever.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.