adding date time stamp

[Rob Franks]

I do this all the time from my SR11 with; Vegas Pro, Excalibur plugin, ReNamer.

If you drag the clips DIRECTLY from the cam onto your computer then Windows explorer (do not import with PMB!)will show the REAL time/date in the date column when the window is viewed in the “details” view.

Use ReNamer (or similar batch re-naming program) to re-name the clips with the explorer time/date, then import to Vegas

In Excalibur plugin there is a subroutine called “quicklabels” which has the ability to automatically place the names of the clip(s) which in this case is the time/date, on a separate overlay track complete with in/out region markers. (This is all done in a few seconds for 500 or so clips. Of course Quicklabels allows you to choose the placement of the time/date stamp as well as font… color… etc.

From here you can render it out with the time/date as a permanent overlay burned into the video…. but that requires some rendering time… and a bit of quality loss. I instead like to use the “Export regions as subtitles” script (supplied with Vegas) to create a subtitle set for import to DVDa. This requires no rendering of any overlay. I import the subtitle info to DVDa when I burn the Blu Ray disk. The end result is a time/date stamp that can be turned on/off with the remote and no quality losses due to rendering in an overlay track.

Excalibur: https://www.jetdv.com/excalibur/home.php
ReNamer: https://www.den4b.com/downloads.php?project=ReNamer

[Ali Elamin]

thank you for the response but i am still learning vegas so forgive me i did not follow in all what you are saying so let me ask you this

1- what is n/out region markers?

2- what is DVDa? I google it a little and the search says it is DVD audio! i do not think this is correct

3- you are saying “Export regions as subtitles” and this will allow me to keep the quality of my video and I want this but the video is actually a series of little clips. will i be able to merge these clips together without rendering and end up with one video file?

[Rob Franks]

Region markers are markers that come in sets of 2… a start marker and a finish marker. They’re used for many different things but in this case they’re used to indicate the start of a time/date stamp and then its finish.

For example… if I have 2 clips together on the time line and one clip was shot on saturday and the other on sunday then I would use a start marker at the beginning of the first clip and a finish marker at the end of the first clip and the word “SATURDAY” in text in between the markers. The start and finish marker will tell the dvd player to flash “SATURDAY” on the screen in text for only the period of time that the first clip is being shown. The same thing is done with the second clip only the text “SUNDAY” is used. So on playback in a dvd player, “SATURDAY” is flashed as a subtitle when the first clip is viewed and “SUNDAY” when the second clip comes up.

“DVDa” is slang for DVD Architect. It’s a dvd/Blu Ray burner program that comes with Sony Vegas. I’m not sure what your final output will be so your workflow may or may not finish the same as mine (I burn my work to Blu Ray and use the time/date stamp as subtitles).

[Ali Elamin]

let me tell you what i want as final output

first i am shooting using the best settings xr520 offers when examining these clips’ properties through sony vegas i get the following

Video:00:00:10.400, 25.000 fps interlaced, 1920x1080x12, AVC
Audio 1:00:00:10.400, 48,000 Hz, 5.1 Surround (stereo downmix), Dolby AC-3
Audio 2:00:00:10.400, 48,000 Hz, 5.1 Surround, Dolby AC-3

now why do i have two audio streams and why Audio 1 has “stereo downmix” ? i could not find an answer for that (if some one can shed some light on this matter it would be nice)

now regarding what i want as my final output

1- merge the clips together preserving their chronological sequence
2- find away to embed the date/time stamp (already covered that)
3- preserve the resolution 1290*1080.
4- preserve the surround 5.1 sound

if i need to re-encode i would like to do it in such away that quality loss would me minimal can you suggest a format/settings that would accomplish this

thank you for your time

[Rob Franks]

Vegas automatically generates both a 5.1 file and a downmix file because it does not know what you want to choose as an end result. Maybe you don’t want 5.1 sound on the time line and you simply want stereo. Vegas doesn’t know the answer to this so it generates a downmix file to leave you with a choice of the file type you wish to use.

If you go to disk (so you can use the subtitle feature) then you will not have to re-encode. The subtitle file (time/date file) is a unique file that the dvd player uses and it stays SEPARATE from the video. If your final result is to be like a final file on a hard drive that you will use for play back, then you will have to re-encode to burn in the time/date into your video. When you re-encode you will always lose a bit of quality.

[Ali Elamin]

thank you for the input about the downmix issue. As i told you earlier with regard to what i want as my final output

1- merge the clips together preserving their chronological sequence
2- find away to embed the date/time stamp (already covered that)
3- preserve the resolution 1290*1080.
4- preserve the surround 5.1 sound

i have a series of .m2ts clips it would sure be nice to keep them in their original format but i need to merge them so they become one file is this possible?
and i will export the date time stamp as subtitle (please note that i only have DL DVD writer) so i will write the resulting file to the DVD as data file with the subtitle file in the same directory with same name. is this a viable solution?if yes how?

Now having said that i do not mind losing some quality as long as the above 4 conditions are satisfied and this loss is not visually noticeable.

I tested rendering using wmv v11 with 8Mbps HD 1080-30p video, 5.1 surround. the result was excellent but it produced a 262 Mb file out of 100 MB original material, and i did not do anything fancy. the only thing i added was an overlay video track where the time stamps appears and put the 2 .m2ts clips beside each other on the video track.

I tried to using Sony AVC template AVCHD 1920*1080-50i 5.1 surround (in hope that i can get the same results as with wmv encoding but with reduced size) and:

1- i pressed custom
2- went to system tab and choose mp4
3- tried to save and sony vegas gave the following error was produced

An error occurred while creating the media file test.mp4
An error occurred while opening a codec

i have verified that i have mp4 codecs in my system and i can play mp4 movies how can i fix this problem?

sorry for the long posts
and again thank you for your time and input

[Rob Franks]

I could be wrong but I’m not sure that MP4 allows for Dolby Surround sound (AC3)… but more to the point…. why are you trying to produce MP4 files?? Simply output your file as M2TS.

[Ali Elamin]

first mp4 allows surround sound.
second mp4 allows progressive encoding which from what i read is better for playback right?
third i think (i could be wrong) that mp4 preserve the quality with less file size

but even if all of the above is invalid i still would like to know why sony vegas produces the following error message

An error occurred while creating the media file test.mp4
An error occurred while opening a codec

and how to fix it

lastly rendering with m2ts is it a lossless re-encoding?

[Rob Franks]

Yes… mp4 supports surround sound but it’s most often AAC…. NOT…. AC3.

What you want is a M2TS container, not mp4. It supports both h.264 and AC3. It is also the standard for AVCHD that can be readily played back in most blu ray players. I’m not sure I have ever heard any one converting their avchd to mp4 with AC3…. this is not the norm.

[Colin Browell]

Another possibility is DVMP Pro which can date stamp the frames, outputting a high res AVI file which can be uncompressed, lossless compressed (e.g. lagarith) or compressed using other compressors on your PC. Alternatively it can output a subtitle file that can be used in many DVD authoring programs. You can also choose to “stamp” or produce subtitles including other metadata such as shutter speed, f-stop, gain, focus distance etc provided your camera stores these metadata types. There’s a demo version available to play with from https://www.dvmp.co.uk