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So I have a bunch of home video files with my kids and family. I want to do some edits like text overlay, music backgrounds etc and also compress them using Photoshop CC. However, after compressing or exporting the video file, the original EXIF is lost. I don't have the capture date and time, the camera & lens used etc.

How can I make Photoshop keep this information? Or is there a way to copy the EXIF after the export?

I tried using ffmpeg, but it only copies the capture date and time.

Thanks.

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I don't think any video release format allows per-frame metadata. The best you can do is per-file metadata, which won't preserve the info from individual scenes in an edited piece.

It's theoretically possible to construct a file in (say) AVI format which uses RIFF chunks. You could add text chunks at scene changes to tag the source. But AFAIK this is not something anyone has actually done -- you'd have to build it yourself.

What you might do is use an EDL to identify the shots by source and time, and use it to index a database that holds the extracted EXIF data from each source.

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  • I'll vote up since it is an informative post, but I think you may have overcomplicated what the OP seems to be asking. It sounds like he is just doing very basic manipulation rather than what we'd typically think of as editing. Sounds like he is going 1 clip to 1 clip, just adding text, color changes, music tracks, etc to the clip and then re-exporting. So he has meta-data on the clip coming in but when he renders out the meta data is destroyed. He just wants a way to preserve it on the re-render, similar to how RAW EXIF survives on to a rendered JPEG.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 14:03
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    Yep, he probably wants a 1 shot = 1 clip solution, but I don't think the question is limited to that, hence the more complicated answer. For the simpler case, it's still probably a matter of using a container that allows per-file free form metadata, which many do, and copying it manually. I've never seen a consumer video container that holds structured EXIF metadata.
    – Jim Mack
    Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 14:13
  • agreed, I just wanted to make sure that was clarified for him.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 14:15
  • Thanks guys for your answers. AJ is right about my needs. I just need to keep capture date & time and maybe camera & lens data (I use a Canon 7D). I posted the same question on SuperUser and someone suggested using exiftool: exiftool -tagsFromFile original.mts newfile.mp4 and that works, partially. It copies capture time and camera, but no lens info. It's not all I needed, but it's something. Thanks for contributing :)
    – noname
    Commented Mar 13, 2014 at 14:41

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