Can a file be completely renamed?

[Steve McGilchrist]

First of all, thank you Paul for a very niche, but valuable, app. It’s valuable because I don’t know how I can achieve my aim without it.
I have around 30 miniDV tapes of our young family from a Sony TRV8E camcorder, recorded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I captured the DV to AVI using firewire and Sony Vegas software in 2015. The software detected the start of each tape record activation and split the contents of the tape into separate AVI files. This means that I have up to 50 files per tape. The files have sat on a hard drive ever since. The PAL 720 x 576 AVI video is interlaced to enable it to be played on the analogue CRT TVs of that time. Increasingly, AVI is seen as a legacy format so I want to prepare the files for conversion to a more modern format such as h.264 or h.265. I intend to convert to new files but retain the AVI files.
Although AVI files have a lot of metadata, including the very important date and time recorded, often much of it is not detected and you might think the data didn’t exist. File Explorer detects basic information but not all, as does Adobe Bridge, which I have previously found to be really good when organising and renaming files of scanned film negatives. I knew the metadata was there with the AVI files because I had installed and used MediaInfo, a really useful tool.
Why is this important? It’s because the date and time of recording is a really good way to save and organise the files so that they are in truly sequential order. When I’ve used Handbrake or Topaz AI (trial only) to deinterlace and save to a more modern progressive scan format, the original recorded date and time information is lost (even with Handbrake metadata pass through). Therefore, the only option is to change the file name to include the recorded date and time. In DVdate, the settings can be adjusted to output the date and time in the format you prefer, which is great. However, when I’ve carried out some trial renaming, the recorded date and time are added to the filename, but the old filename is not overwritten and remains part of the new filename. For instance, using Rename then Add datecode, the original file home5 04.avi becomes 20080529_14.41.59 home5 04.avi. The neat part is that the recorded date – 29th May 2008 is saved, as well as the time 2:41:59pm. However, the original file name was arbitrary so I would like to lose it and just change the filename to 20080529_14.41.59.avi My question is – is this possible?

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