Metadata injection and corruption on original recordings

[lamacchiacosta]

Hello everyone,
one of my main duties is also to create a library from the gazillions of recordings I am doing on a daily basis.
For obvious reasons I cannot do it straight away and I usually do it on my downtime, which means it could be months or years after the event happened.
Yesterday I created a new session for a job on which I did few overnight multitrack continuous recordings at 48Khz, 24bit.
The first annoyance is that protools cannot cope, still in v12.6, with long hours sessions.
The second one is that I realised that when I import the original files into the session with the command "Add" or "Add all" PT will inject new metadata on the "Originator" and "OriginatorReference", changing form the original recorder brand and serial number (or my own reference data) to Pro Tools and a random useless code. Also it corrupts the Origination date cutting out the second digit of the day.
In my specific case it made it impossible to know on what day I recorded specific sounds, which is bad, really bad for archival needs.
I recorded my files between the 1st and the 8th of July of 2016. This date, in the OriginationDate appear as 2016-07-01, if recorded on the first and so on. PT corrupted that and all the files now have the OriginationDate set to 2016-07-0, which make it impossible to recognise when they were recorded. Luckily it kept the OriginationTime, so at list I know at what time they were recorded and with a massive memory effort I was able to guess the day of some of them.

I could expect this behavior if I import the files with the "Convert All" function but the other way PT shouldn't inject incorrect data leaving the original files untouched.

I can get around this issue when files are organised in daily folders but sometimes on jobs I do two different folders, the daily ones, for dialogues and sync related stuff and the Atmos Tracks folder for Ambiences and stuff not related to sync sound.

I apologise for my frustration, but it is frustrating.
Naughty Pro Tools, naughty!!

[joachim]

I can confirm this on PT 11.3.1 with files from a SD633.
With a metadata reading program I got the "Origination Date yyyy mm dd" of a file of "2016-11-29",
after "add" into PT, I ran the program on the same file again, now the "Origination Date yyyy mm dd" is "2016-11-2 ". ("9" missing)

Did this test with another file from the recorder, also "2016-11-29", but did use "copy" on import into PT.
In the workspace browser, the "Shooting Date" revealed correctly "29.11.2016".
After closing of the session and reopening, it showed there "02.11.2016". (Same "9" missing).
Running the program on this imported copy in the audio files folder, revealed, that the date is now also corrupted : "2016-11-2 ".

It seems, that the last byte of the 10 bytes for "Origination Date yyyy:mm:dd" in the BEXT-Chunk is not read correctly or set to zero.

Maybe move your thread to the Post section. May get more attention from specialists and/or PT11-users there.

[Carl Kolchak]

Two random brain farts :

Is it possible to change the date format to dd/mm/yyyy before importing?

Alternatively, instead of copying / converting the files, what if you just add them, and then if needs be , consolidate them?


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