How to Embed EXIF Metadata when Converting from MOV to AVI

Site visitor Laurence had a very specific problem – when converting videos taken with his DSLR from .MOV to AVI file format, the EXIF data never got stored in the AVI's metadata. He wanted a (free) software solution that allowed him to embed the EXIF information for future reference.

The answer – abcAVI Tag Editor by software developer Alexander Sorkin.

abcAVI Tag Editor allows you to embed tag information in the header of AVI files using the "Comments" and "Additional Information" fields.

From site visitor Laurence:

"Procedure:

1. Open Canon's Digital Photo Professional (software bundled with the camera) and navigate to the source MOV file.
2. In DPP, right click the MOV file and select INFO from the pulldown menu or just hit CTRL-I. This pulls up a dialog box with the Shooting Information and Metadata.
3. Click any line in the Shooting Information section to highlight it, then CTRL-A to Select All, then CTRL-C to copy everything to the clipboard.
4. Open the target AVI file in abcAVI Tag Editor. You will see four tabs labelled 'Primary Tags', 'Movie Credits', 'Additional Tags' and 'Other Tags'. Select 'Primary Tags', and you will see a field called 'Comments'. Right click anywhere in the field and hit CTRL-V. You will see the Shooting Info from the MOV pasted in. The same procedure can be done under the 'Additional Tags' tab to paste the Shooting Info into the 'Additional Information' field if you wanted to.
5. Up at the top of the abcAVI Tag Editor window is an icon of a floppy disk. Click this and it saves the metadata changes (i.e., it writes the Shooting Info into the Header area of the AVI file). Now close abcavi Tag Editor.

To verify that the EXIF data was saved, you can open the AVI file with a Hex editor or Notepad++ and you will see the Shooting Info right up at the top following the second 'LIST' entry.

NOTE: For photographers who are into Geotagging or Geocaching, abcavi Tag Editor lets you easily add Lat/Long or Geocaching data to the rest of the shooting info (get lat/long from Google Earth if you don't have a GPS tracklog for your video location) and embed that into the AVI along with the rest of the Canon EXIF data. Just type it in manually anywhere you like with the other EXIF data you copied in from the MOV."

Thanks Laurence for sending that in!