Why is Camera Data Missing From Video Files?

Geoff asked an interesting question:

Over the years of using digital cameras, both for still and video photography, I have sometimes had the need to find out which camera and/or lens I used to take a photo or video. With stills, there is an impressive level of information available about how and when a photo was taken.

However, despite an enormous amount of searching, I can only find a very limited amount metadata information concerning video files. Such basic information like which camera or lens was used in the video capture appears to be completely missing.

Why?

A totally unnecessary, but quite lovely, photo of a Buddhist temple  in Bangkok, Thailand.
This is the video I used for this example.

Larry: Well, my first response is that because video uses zoom lenses so much, getting precise focal length information would be hard. But, his question intrigued me. Why doesn’t video contain similar data to a still image?

My first thought was that this should be part of the EXIF data, which Wikipedia defines as:

A standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras. The specification uses the following existing encoding formats with the addition of specific metadata tags: JPEG lossy coding for compressed image files, TIFF Rev. 6.0 (RGB or YCbCr) for uncompressed image files, and RIFF WAV for audio files (linear PCM or ITU-T G.711 μ-law PCM for uncompressed audio data, and IMA-ADPCM for compressed audio data).[6] It does not support JPEG 2000 or GIF encoded images.

Hmm… OK, EXIF is for stills and audio, not video. So, let’s see what video information is stored in the file. Surprisingly, different applications display different amounts of data.

When I get info on a movie in the Finder, there’s lots of data, but nothing about the camera, lens or other exposure information.

When I look at movie info in QuickTime Player, there’s lot of information, but, again,  nothing about camera, lens, f/stop or ISO.

When I look at the same movie in FCP, most of this information is missing EVEN THOUGH it is in the file. Surely, even Apple would know when an iPhone recorded a movie.

When I look at the same movie in Premiere, virtually all of this information is missing.

What I find truly puzzling is that obvious data, such as camera manufacturer, model, bit depth, ISO, and f/stop which are written into every still image, are not displayed for video. Worse, data which is recorded into the video is not displayed, nor searchable.

My license to ff-Works expired, but Geoff downloaded the trial version and reported:

Yes indeed, ff-Works shows a great deal more information, but unless I’ve missed it, I can’t see any reference to the model of camera used, nor the model of lens used. To my way of thinking, these are two very basic pieces of information that could so easily be included in any video file data, Also, I can’t imagine that I’m the only person who has ever wanted such information.

Then, Geoff suggested a workaround:

I’ve just finished speaking with a good friend of mine, who made the following suggestion:

When I start a day’s shooting, take a still image at the beginning, and store this with the day’s video files. That way I’d have all the camera and lens data I could possibly want to reference stored in the stills metadata, plus the other video data in the video file. Off course this won’t help me find much in earlier videos, but it would be very helpful from now onwards.

Larry adds: Clearly, some data, such as lens focal length, applies more to still images than video, where zooms are common. Still, it seems to me that key camera data would not be hard to add because they are already recording it for still images.

Even more important, though, is that once the information is added to the file, we should be able to display whatever data is there, then search on it to find the shot we need. Neither FCP nor Premiere seem to do that.

What camera information do you feel should be stored in the file? What data would you like to search on? Add your thoughts in the comments.