Using the title of my movies to use as the video creation date

[DavidSG]

Can I please ask for some help of the following please:

I am Mac user with limited coding abilities.

I have thousands of old family video clips recorded with old camcorders.

These clips DO NOT have a 'creation date' saved in metadata. Instead the date of the movie is saved in the title e.g. 'clip-2009-10-11 12;33;31.mp4'.

As I want these thousands of video clips to be sorted in the correct chronological order after I import them in iPhoto, I want to use exiftool to enter the correct 'creation date' for all these video clips.

This would be done by reading the date and time in the title (clip-2009-10-11 12;33;31.mp4'. => date='2009-10-11' and time ='12:33:31') and saving it as the exif creation date.

Would anyone be kind enough to guide me on how to do this as a batch on my thousands of videos ?

Many thanks in advance.

[StarGeek]

This mostly would be FAQ #5, specifically the 3rd paragraph ("Having said this").

As long as there are 14 numbers in the correct order, no extraneous leading numbers, then your command would be
exiftool '-CreateDate<Filename' -api QuickTimeUTC /path/to/files/

This command creates backup files.  Add -Overwrite_Original to suppress the creation of backup files.  Add -r to recurse into subdirectories.

Take note that this command assumes that the timestamp is local to the timezone that the computer is set to.  This is because the CreateDate tag in video files is supposed to be set to UTC (see 4th paragraph under Quicktime tags).  If it was filmed in a different time zone, then the command would be a bit more complex.