The time stored inside every clip
Every time you record, the camera writes the recording date and time inside the file, in the video's own metadata (in MOV and MP4 files, tags like CreateDate and MediaCreateDate). That's the time editors and clip-sorting tools read.
Don't confuse it with the date Windows shows in File Explorer: that's the file's date, and it changes by itself when you copy the file. The one that matters is the one inside.
Why it matters so much with several cameras
With one camera, file order is enough. With several, knowing what each camera was doing at each moment means comparing their times. If one camera runs twenty minutes fast, its clips land twenty minutes later than the rest, and the "I do" ends up in the middle of cocktails.
The usual failures
1. The clock was never set
A new camera, or one whose clock battery died, starts at a default date. It happened to us with a mini DVR hooked to a VHS: every time it switched on it went back to 1 January 2020, and the copied files carried the time of the copy. Twenty-two forty-second clips looked like they were shot in sixteen seconds.
2. A few minutes between cameras
The most common one: every camera is "on time", each in its own way. A minute or two is enough for a cut between cameras not to match.
3. Another country's time
A phone that travels changes time zone; a camera doesn't. Coming back from a trip or shooting with people from abroad, you can end up with cameras on different countries' times.
4. Daylight saving
If a camera wasn't adjusted for the clock change, it's an hour off from the ones that were.
How to spot it
- All of one camera's clips land shifted by the same amount.
- A camera that seems to record several things at once: clips overlapping each other.
- Impossible dates: years before the camera existed, or days that haven't come yet.
How Ingest Pro handles it
Ingest Pro places clips by recording time, so it's built to live with these problems:
- It detects the cameras' time zones.
- It ignores impossible dates (before 1990 or after tomorrow) instead of sending the clip to another decade.
- When a camera has no reliable clock (its clips overlap each other, like the mini DVR), it places its clips by file number, one after another, which is the order they were recorded in.
- It fine-tunes by audio the few seconds clocks are always off by.
How to fix a camera's time
If a camera recorded with the wrong time, the clean fix is to correct it in the files themselves before editing. That's what Clock Fix Pro does, free and with no clip limit:
- It rewrites the recording date inside the file, the one Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut read.
- It works in batches: set an exact date or add or subtract time across every clip, which fixes a clock three hours behind without losing the gaps between takes.
- It doesn't touch the video: metadata only, no re-encoding. It makes a backup and you can undo.
Prevention takes a minute
- Before every shoot, set every camera to the same reference clock, such as your phone's.
- At the start, film your phone showing the time on each camera. If something goes wrong, you'll know exactly how much to correct.
- Check the date and time after swapping batteries or after a trip.