On my last vacation, I have shot a bunch of videos with two cameras. The problem was that camera #1 time was set to one hour later than camera #2. So in order for the videos to show up correctly in my video editing software, I needed to fix that.
I use OSX and could not find a quick way to do this. If you have XCode installed, this will come with SetFile, a command line utility that can change file creation dates. Note that SetFile can change either the file creation date, or the file modification date, but not both at the same time. Also note that SetFile expects dates in American notation…
Anyways, here’s a small Python script that changes the file creation time of a bunch of video files (which names contain string “P14”):
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import os
import datetime
def modify_file_creation_date(path='.'):
"""
Alter the creation and modification time (set it one hour earlier) of all files named *P14* in path
"""
files = []
# r=root, d=directories, f = files
for r, d, f in os.walk(path):
for file in f:
if "P14" in file:
# get creation date and time
date = (os.path.getctime(file))
# create a new date, just one hour earlier
new_date = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(date) - datetime.timedelta(minutes=60)
print("File %s - ORIGINAL DATETIME: %s - NEW DATETIME: %s\n" %(file, datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(date), new_date ))
# set the file creation date with the "-d" switch, which presumably stands for "dodification"
os.system('SetFile -d "{}" {}'.format(new_date.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S'), file))
# set the file modification date with the "-m" switch
os.system('SetFile -m "{}" {}'.format(new_date.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S'), file))
modify_file_creation_date()