my current workflow for home movies
- get the file into mp4 format, either by selecting this on the camera or converting using a program such as Adobe Media Encoder
- see how many vertical pixels your input file has, and use the corresponding Apple preset at 29.97fps:
- if input file is 480 high, use “Apple TV, iPad, iPhone 4 and newer - 480p Widescreen 29.97, H.264”
- if input file is 720 high, use “Apple TV, iPad, iPhone 4 and newer - 720p Widescreen 29.97, H.264”
- if input file is 1080 high, use “Apple iPad 2, iPhone 4S - 1080p 29.97, H.264”
- use exiftool to read date information from your files so you can set tags correctly
- here is an example reading existing mp4 files that came from a camera directly. The last sed conversion is to make the date show with dashes so you can easily copy and paste into MetaX because the colons : it originally shows with will not work; time of day is also removed
`which ls` -1 *.MP4|while read file;do echo "${file}" `exiftool -s -time:all "${file}" | grep "MediaCreateDate"`; done | sed -e 's/MediaCreateDate //g' -e 's/[0-9:]*-.*//g' -e 's/:/-/g' - see archiving avchd for another example usage; some files may use different tags for the correct creation date
- use MetaX to set the following tags in your files:
- when first asked what type of videos are these files, answer “TV Shows”
- with all files selected, go to Advanced, enter “Home Movies” as the Show
- with all corresponding files selected (same year), go to Advanced, enter only the 4 digit year as the Season
- select each file one by one…
- go to Info, copy and paste the year yyyy-mm-dd from the exiftool output
- (optional) enter a description of the video in the “Short Description” box
- when all finished, click the “Write” button
- import the file into iTunes, and it will show a TV Show “Home Movies” on your Apple TV, with seasons, dates, and descriptions available in your living room
Tips
- if you need help renaming multiple files, see rename multiple files
- be sure to clean up the cache files after using because they take up a lot of space and it seems that Adobe doesn't do a good job at this (adjust location if not using the default)
rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/Common/Media\ Cache\ Files/*