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Timestamp on Videos D610


andrew_gale

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Thanks in advance. I just started shooting some video on my D610. When i imported it to my computer i noticed that the timestamp is off.

Ive attached a screenshot showing a video and a still image in windows explorer. Date modified is the actual time they were shot, but if i were to change anything about the files (including adding or tagging metadata) this field would change.

Date Created = the time of the import to my computer

Media Created = field that only exists for video and is off by 4 hours

Date = date taken, but also off by 4 hours on video

Date taken = correct date taken for photos but not a field for video

 

Whats going on? I need to sort videos and photos by the actual date taken. How would i do that?

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Sounds as if the camera time is set incorrectly. The camera only automatically 'knows' the correct time if a GPS module is connected to it, and the menu option for using the UTC is set. Otherwise the camera just uses the time that's set by the user, and will gain or lose time like any non-synchronised timepiece.
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I assume Andrew's issue is that the "media created" metadata field in the .MOV file and the timestamp in the file system file differ, rather than that the time is itself inaccurate. As he says, there's a 4-hour disparity.

 

Andrew: Might I hypothesise that you're in a time zone that's four hours off UTC? I could believe that there might be a bug (I assume it's more likely to be in the camera than the metadata reader) which would be writing a value that ignores the time zone. I guess it's possible that the time got modified when the file was imported (less likely if you just copied the files onto your computer than if you imported them via some software), but it seems unlikely to have a difference of four hours, especially in what is presumably the wrong direction. I don't know my .MOV file metadata fields, but I assume the time field isn't supposed to be time zone invariant.

 

Are you on the latest firmware? Not that the list of changes indicates that they've fixed anything like this. Might it be worth checking with Nikon to see if it's a known issue? (I don't have a video to hand to see whether I can replicate it with my cameras.)

 

Your concern with sorting by "date modified" is that you want to be able to modify the files and not have the ordering change? I'm assuming (from your image) that you're using Windows; if so, there's apparently a "robocopy" command (described here) which you could use to import the files and clone the original creation date, which would mean you could sort on that. You could also use the Windows Subsystem for Linux and use Linux command-line options to do the same thing (though you might have to jump through some hoops, since many Linux systems don't actually store a creation date separately from modification and the tools might be less obvious for that).

 

Actually modifying the metadata is a bit more involved (at least in bulk - I would hope your video editing software would let you do so on a file-by-file basis). exiftool might do it, in which case you could come up with a script to bulk change the metadata of a load of files to match the modification date - although a little rummaging suggests you may be out of luck with that route, I'm afraid. Someone will probably sell you a small utility to do it, but tread a little carefully because this is the kind of thing that has been known to be dodgy.

 

I hope that's a pointer in a useful direction? Someone with easier access to Nikon-created video files might be able to say whether the behaviour you're seeing applies to other cameras, or indeed whether I'm completely misdiagnosing it.

 

Good luck...

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I guess it's possible that the time got modified when the file was imported (less likely if you just copied the files onto your computer than if you imported them via some software),

I'd suspect some intervening 'sorting' software as well. There should be no discrepancy between created and modified with a file straight off the camera.

Date modified is the actual time they were shot, but if i were to change anything about the files.......

Date Created = the time of the import to my computer

That seems wrong. The created date shouldn't change at all.

 

However, I notice that the field simply marked 'Date' appears to correctly echo the time/date shot. Can you not simply sort on that field?

Edited by rodeo_joe|1
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I'd suspect some intervening 'sorting' software as well. There should be no discrepancy between created and modified with a file straight off the camera.

 

I'm not sure I'd put money on that. If you just copy a file in Windows, the "date created" (as opposed to "date modified" - you might have to "add columns" in your Explorer view to see it) reflects the time of the copy, not the original time. The file on the card is probably the time the camera created it, but I assume these files were copied onto a computer. Certainly I only ever just drag and drop the files, so I'd have the same problem.

 

That seems wrong. The created date shouldn't change at all.

 

However, I notice that the field simply marked 'Date' appears to correctly echo the time/date shot. Can you not simply sort on that field?

 

Except that the MOV file is incorrect by exactly four hours. Hence my suspicion that the time zone handling is incorrect. I'll try to remember to have a look at a file from my D850 when I get home.

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Thanks for your replies. To answer some questions:

  • [uSER=2403817]@rodeo_joe|1[/uSER] Obviously my camera time is set correctly, and is irrelevant to my problem which is a dependency between photos and videos. My settings are timezone=New York UTC-5, Format=Y/M/D and daylight savings time is ON.
  • @Andrew Garrard i am in a timezone that is typically off of UTC by 4 hours, however this seems highly unlikely as currently we are 5 hours off, and its 4 hours in the wrong direction. The media created field is 9 hours off UTC. I only used windows explorer and drag and dropped the files. Are you suggesting that I robocopy my files in and use the date modified to generate the date created field? That could work well.
  • [uSER=2403817]@rodeo_joe|1[/uSER] no intervening software. windows determines the date created to be the timestamp of when the file was created, not the original file, also that couldnt explain it, sometimes i copy files minutes after i shoot them, sometimes days, not always exactly 4 hours. The "Date" field is whats wrong...

 

  • Still photos all show the exactly correct times in all fields.
  • Only videos are affected in this way.

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Hi Andrew. I had a bit of a look on my Mac for the last video I shot (not recent!) - it shows the file creation, content creation and modification dates as identical and match when the image would have been taken (although it looks like I forgot to change time zone, so they're often in the middle of the night). However, it's possible that the Mac doesn't change file creation date when copying files by default, and I'm not sure anything is looking at the file's internal metadata - that may still be incorrect and I haven't noticed. I'll see whether I can do another experiment later, but it'll take a little longer. :-)

 

Just to confirm: all videos are showing with a "media created" metadata time four hours ahead of the file modification time? Just checking it wasn't a coincidence that this one happened to be exactly four hours (I'm a little confused by one of your comments to Joe). If it's a bug, maybe something is applying a timezone offset twice (perhaps meaning to pick up the daylight savings offset instead)? New York with daylight savings is four hours behind UTC/GMT (five behind BST, and UTC-5 without daylight savings); you're right that the metadata time is in the wrong direction for a representation in UTC.

 

I can check a D850, D810 and D90 (which is as old as Nikon's video support goes), but if anyone can check a Z6 or Z7 it would be interesting to know whether this behaviour exists there.

 

It looks like robocopy should be able to copy the files without changing the date created field (possibly via "robocopy source_directory destination_directory /TIMFIX") and use that to get them off the card reader and onto your computer. Updating an existing created field from a modified field might be a bit more involved; I'm more of a Linux person than Windows, so while I could work out how to script it on Linux (with "stat" and "touch"), there may be better ways on Windows.

 

I'll try to report back, at least if nobody else can confirm the behaviour of other Nikons first. It might be worth reaching out to Nikon technical support - they might either say "yes, we know, sorry" or "oops, we'll issue a fix". They may never have noticed.

 

Thanks for pointing this out, especially if it turns out to be a wide-ranging bug.

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If you just copy a file in Windows, the "date created" (as opposed to "date modified" - you might have to "add columns" in your Explorer view to see it) reflects the time of the copy, not the original time.

OK. That's one more piece of Microsoft idiocy that I was unaware of. They obviously use a different dictionary from the rest of the world.... or maybe it's some kind of subtle dig at creationists.

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OK. That's one more piece of Microsoft idiocy that I was unaware of. They obviously use a different dictionary from the rest of the world.... or maybe it's some kind of subtle dig at creationists.

 

:) I guess the behaviour didn't shock me. If you just "cp" on Linux, it appears that the copied file sets all of "access", "modify" and (status) "change" to the time of the copy (according to stat - but I'm doing that on a vfat USB stick). "cp -a" (and presumably "cp -p") preserves the timestamps. Linux doesn't really like you getting at the file creation/birth time, although (and at this point I'm writing this mostly so I can find the information again in the future) 'sudo debugfs -R "stat /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/FILE" /dev/sdxX | grep ctime' will tell you something if it's actually on an ext4 partition).

 

The possibly simplest solution is that it appears (and please confirm this) that if you move the files on Windows rather than copying them, it preserves the "date created" field. At least, I just tried moving a file and this appeared to be the case. I've not checked across file systems. I probably should have checked that before. It doesn't help if you're trying to archive, of course - then you'll still need something like robocopy.

 

Anyway, reporting back: I tried my D90, my D810 and my D850. I set them all to New York time with daylight savings on, and recorded video for a few seconds with the lens cap on. I used "cp -a" on Linux to copy them off the SD card from the camera onto a (vfat) USB stick, then again (on a different Linux box) onto a shared ntfs partition where I could examine them from a Windows machine; this seems to have mangled less than you might expect, although the "date created" is the time when I did the final copy onto ntfs. For the D810 and D850 (which create .MOV files), Windows reports Media Created to match the Date Modified time:

 

NikonVideoCreationTime.png.cedd131e3a51379385f0d8a0b807972f.png

Windows Explorer can't (I think) report anything on the metadata of the AVI file produced by the D90. Exiftool reports that the "Create Date" and "Date/Time Original" was correct in terms of timezone and reports 04.07 - it reports around 4am for the others as well, so I deduce that the stored time metadata coming out of Exiftool doesn't incorporate daylight savings (although the .MOV file metadata has a "Daylight Savings" field that seems to be missing from the AVI, so you might not be able to fix it for a D90's AVI file). I'd not rely on the D90 analysis - partly because I might have done something wrong, and haven't tried shooting video on my D90 before. Being Nikon's first implementation, it's bound to be a bit primitive, so it might genuinely ignore daylight savings - but I don't want to besmirch the good name of Nikon engineers.

 

This experiment also had the helpful side effect of reminding me to reset the timezones on all my Nikons, which I'm terrible at remembering to do, so thanks for that.

 

There's some guidance here on how to update the metadata retrospectively on Windows, if you need to fix things. Some programming required, though.

 

In summary: I don't think I'm seeing the misbehaviour Andrew reports on the D610, which suggests that if it was a bug (and it sounds like one), Nikon fixed it for other cameras, but didn't bother to patch the D610 retrospectively. I'll be interested to know:

  • Whether anyone can reproduce this on a D610
  • Whether anyone can reproduce this on another camera of similar vintage or older (D600, D4, D800, D7100, D4s... I'd say Df, but...) to see whether it was at one point correct and it got broken specifically on the D610, or if it was always broken and I was lucky that it happened to get fixed before my D810 (at least with the current firmware); if it applies to lots of cameras, we should be more aware of it
  • Whether Nikon own up to it

One last thing: Try a reset on the D610, just in case something has got confused and this should actually be working? Cameras with configuration state that gets maintained for a long time have been known to get hit by cosmic rays (or random unrelated bugs that corrupt memory). If that fixes it, please let us know - and likewise if you can get Nikon to comment!

 

This has been educational - thank you. I hope my spelunking helps you a bit.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Just nudging this - has anyone been able to have a look on other bodies? I'm curious whether this is an actual Nikon snafu and what it's affecting, or whether something odd happened to Andrew's set-up. If you're looking at the files in Windows Explorer (the normal directory view), right click where it normally says things like "Name", "Date modified", "Type" etc. and choose "more..." and then "Media created" from the list. Cheers.
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To avoid all the confusion with time zones and daylight savings, I have resorted to setting all my cameras to UTC and ignore daylight savings altogether. Granted, I lose the (to me rather irrelevant) time at the location (which I could, if needed, reconstruct with a bit of effort) - but at least I minimize the issues if I want to sort files by time stamp.

has anyone been able to have a look on other bodies

No, I haven't - though this thread may prompt me to look into this a bit more.

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