Bad Question

[JackTX]

Hello,

I would like to extract all available metadata from every frame/image within a movie file and populate a database with the output.

If I point exiftool at a file which says it contains 560 frames, that is great and then I want all the data from each of the 560 frames.

I have tried to ask the question as broadly as possible and I imagine I will be flamed for it.

If anyone has any ideas or workflow suggestions, that would be great!

TIA,
Jack

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jack,

In general, ExifTool does not extract metadata from individual movie frames.  The exception to this rule is AVCHD videos which may contain camera settings and GPS metadata that is extracted from all frames using the -ee (ExtractEmbedded) option.

What sort of metadata are you interested in?  If you are looking to extract captions, then ExifTool doesn't do this.

- Phil

[JackTX]

I am interested in any available data.  If I have a client with dozens of security cameras (IP, network cameras) and has hard drives full of clips not organized in any manner, I would like to use the available data as a starting point for sorting and organizing.  Viewing a couple of thousand hours of video clips of varying lengths is a nonstarter.  I would like to turn this into a database problem.  There are software packages that will organize video however all the inputs need to be predefined.

Granted, I may have a basic problem in that there may not be enough data captured to do the job or there may be some data and I will have to make assumptions in order to proceed.  Another issue is that the footage may have been processed after the fact which deleted, obscured or changed relevant data.

There are other issues I would like to address while looking at all the frames within a movie clip – dreaded half or partial images, image file size over/under expected, other outlier images, etc.  Moving forward, if I could build a database with new footage, that would be great.

This is basically a puzzle problem where I cannot look at every individual piece to put it back together.

Thanks again,
Jack 

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jack,

It doesn't sound like exiftool will be much use to help you.  Actually, I would be surprised if the video frames contained any meta information that would be useful to you unless these are very smart surveillance systems.  But then I don't have any experience with this sort of thing, so what do I know?

- Phil