Need help changing dates on MTS files

[Tyrop]

I have Windows 10. I have thousands of home movies.  They are organized into folders that are named after the date the movies were taken.  Over the years, I copied them to other hard drives.  (I copied the entire directory structure to keep the folder names intact).  I am using Adobe Premiere Elements Organizer, and it shows many of the dates hugely wrong - possibly they are the dates the folders were copied.    The DateTimeOriginal exif entry appears to be correct on all of them, but Adobe apparently ignores that entry. 

I saw other posts on how to copy the DateTimeOriginal to FileModifyDate and FileCreateDate.  I used the following command, but it did not do anything:

ExifTool "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" 20110520230206.mts

Attached is a screenshot.  You can see that, after I executed that command line, I viewed the various date entries and the FileCreateDate and FileModifyDate do not match the DateTimeOriginal.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have hundreds of videos that are showing up in my organizer completely out of order.

[StarGeek]

The file system time stamps are always in the local time for the computer.  2011:05:20 23:02:06-05:00 is the same time as 2011:05:21 00:02:06-04:00, just in a different time zone.

It would be possible to set those timestamps to 2011:05:20 23:02:06, but the timezone will still be -04:00 and if you show the files on a computer in the -05:00 timezone, then the date will shift to 2011:05:20 22:02:06.

[Tyrop]

Thank you!!  I did not know that.  I should have tried the command on a file that had very different dates.  I just tried it and I see it worked!

One more question if it's not too much trouble.  Is there a command line option for ExifTool to go through all subdirectories and change all mts files?  I have hundreds of folders and I'm hoping I don't have to run ExifTool separately in each folder.

   

[StarGeek]

Use the -r (-recurse) option to recurse into subdirectories.  Add -ext mts to process only MTS files while doing so.  You can't use a wildcard for the filename while recursing, see Common Mistake #2.