merge dashcam footage with gps metadata

[GBalazs]

Hello there,
I'm totally new to ExifTool but I have a friend who have multiple 1 minute dashcam videos and she needs it to be merged into one video file however the GPS data should be preserved in the final file's EXIF. So the GPS data should be in sync with the video footage in the final export. I also have the GPS data in separate .gpx files.

If I do it with Premier Pro the GPS data is lost in the exported file even if I set it to preserve all metadata.

I'm thinking about a workaround to export the merged long video from Premier Pro and I add the GPS data back from a merged .gpx file with ExifTool.

Is it possible or is there another method?

I'm a media artist, has been worked with videos for more than 10 years but I have never dived so deep into EXIF GPS data.

I'm happy to learn so please link any source I can read to get closer to a solution.

Thank you in advance!

[Phil Harvey]

ExifTool doesn't have the ability to write timed GPS to video files.

I don't know anything that will do this.

- Phil

[GBalazs]

Thank you for your quick response!

[GBalazs]

So basically you saying there is no way to merge 1 minute dashcam footage into one longer video with keeping continuous GPS data in final EXIF, right?

I couldn't find any.

[Phil Harvey]

I know of no way to do this.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

My standard copy/paste when it comes to EXIF/GPS data in a video
The problem is that there really isn't a standard for embedding a GPS track in a video* Currently, exiftool reads **71 74 different ways** that a GPS track can be in a video and there are about half a dozen more in which the format hasn't been decoded. I have yet to find a program that will embed a GPS track into a video file.

And that won't be the only data you will lose when recompressing a video. The same situation exists with the EXIF data that is written into the video. Most video data is Quicktime data and EXIF data in a video file is non-standard. But camera companies shove it in there anyway, with each company doing it in different ways.

The best you can do is extract the GPS data into a GPX track and copy the EXIF data into the corresponding XMP tags (see the exif2xmp.args file on GitHub), which are allowed in a video file.

*Technically, there is a standard by Google, but nobody follows it, and I've never found any software that write this format. I mention it in this Exiftool forum's post, which has a response from the author of exiftool

[StarGeek]

One possible work around that has been on my mind is to create a subtitle track for a video. I just looked into it a bit and there are websites and scripts that will create an SRT subtitle file from a GPX track. That SRT file could then sit alongside the video or even be embedded into the video with ffmpeg.

I haven't tried the site/script I mentioned, so I'm not sure on how good the results would be.