Has anyone else had problems with the apparent date of their Noritsu scans? I'm not sure this affects anyone but me, but anyway...
I sent some films to Filmdev for FP4party. When the WeTransfer download came back, I loaded the files into Capture One Pro (12), and did a little modest PP. Then I wanted to make a Smart Album of all the FP4party images this year (ignoring files tagged FP4Party from previous years). However I soon found this wouldn't work as most of the images were apparently dated
01/01/1970. This is a highly suspicious date, being the UNIX "epoch" date, implying that the date fields are actually zero. The same files imported to Aperture (bless) were all appropriately dated. It looks to me as if the Noritsu is creating JPEGs without all the appropriate (exif) metadata tags....
It turns out that C1Pro is a bit fussy about dates. It extracts a couple of dates from the exif metadata tags in the JPEG file; DateTimeOriginal in particular. In the exif tags for these files from the Noritsu, the DateTimeOriginal tag is blank, as is the CreateDate tag. It appears Aperture is happy to use the FileModifyDate (which does have a value), but C1Pro ignores that. I've no idea which tag LightRoom uses, or if it has a problem.
Where Filmdev do some PP, even rotating the file to portrait format, this is done in Photoshop, and apparently PS finds an appropriate tag (presumably the FileModifyDate tag), and copies that, so those files appear properly dated. So this gave le the weird situation where the first 6 files in the folder (ie the first 6 images on my roll) were dated 1970, and the next image was dated 2021!
I rang David at FilmDev and had a chat about the problem; we agreed I'd send him some evidence. After some interactions with strangers on twitter, I found out how to extract the exif tag using exiftool, and sent FilmDev some examples of bad files and good files. They said they'd get their engineer to look into it.
Today they came back with a new set of files which import into C1Pro properly, yeah! This apparently uses an extra step in their workflow, which we would need to request when sending the negatives in. I suspect their engineer has packaged up some exiftool commands to take the FileModifyDate and load it into the DateTimeOriginal tag. The latter tag also gets modified for files that have gone through the Photoshop step, but this shouldn't matter.
Anyway, on the off-chance that anyone else has this problem, please ask FilmDev to fix the image creation dates when you send your negatives. I haven't worked out an appropriate form of words yet, but I'll probably add a note like "Please fix image dates for Capture One Pro"!
Note, I've been very specific about the version of C1Pro, as I'm a couple of versions out of date, and who knows, they might have fixed it in later versions.
Also to note, a couple of years ago there was an opposite problem with films from FilmDev; files that had been through Photoshop often (always?) appeared to Aperture to be dated in 1904, another suspicious date indicating a zero field. It looks like this was a bug in PS that eventually got fixed.
Meanwhile, a nice guy on twitter, name of Colin Devroe, has built me a utility to fix the exif dates for problem files I've already got. At the moment it works, except when there are spaces in directory names, which I use quite a lot (eg "Master images"), so he's trying to fix that. If anyone wants a copy when it's working, I'll put you in touch...