Hours and minutes count up displayed on screen (Set end time) FCPX is this possible?

It goes into Movies/Motion Templates/Generators. When you launch FCP it should be in the Generators browser.

I had nothing to do with the generator. That's all Luis.

You CAN at least remove the date. Just use the trim tool (the same way, you can make it, say, only show hours and minutes).

As for the font, maybe if have a bit of idle time in the weekend, I'll open it into Motion and see if I can publish the font. The thing is, when designing things in Motion, one decides which parameters to publish - those will be user-modifiable in FCP X. I'll take as another opportunity to learn a bit more about Motion.

Hi again,

I had a little time last night and published a few more parameters. You can now, for instance:

- change the font in the generator

- choose to show or not show the date

This is all trivial to do in Motion, and anyone with the program is free to experiment with this generator if they like.

I want to stress that this was not meant for general use, and I am just sharing it as is - I did for fun and as a way to learn a bit about Motion 5.

You can get it using this link:

https://www.yousendit.com/sharedFolder?phi_action=app/orchestrateSharedFolder&id =_6RnMb8p6E4m5nPEiuhk3VtddF-6M5yzC5Z4ES0t45E

I came up with my own workaround.

Using the date of the clip itself, which my camera stamps it (file system date) when it finalizes it, so I use that as the ending time. Then I subtract the duration of the clip to give me a start time.

It probably isn't perfect, but I think it's fairly accurate without having to do a lot of manual adjustments.

Very cool title/generator though. Thank you, and to Luis for taking the time to create it and then sharing. I followed your instructions to recreate it myself, plus I got bold and published a color picker and drop shadow for the font.

That's the first useful thing I did in Motion other than modify a transition. (I'm still learning Motion).

Ken,

Could you share that work around?

If I try to use the one Luis posted, and the RT Generators, all times factors increase. I obviously want my video to display the time in "realtime" as it would on my video camera. If i have a 30 second clip, all of the following progress, month, day, year, hours, minutes, seconds. Years go by on the display on my 15 second clip.

I am perfectly fine with your method of taking the osx attributes and subtracting the clipl length, although I think it would be more accurate to start from the creation time and add to it?

Is there a way to set the time code to move up only by seconds?

I forgot to mention, a typical project could have many, many short clips, sometimes around 100.

This would be a very tedious task, entering the dates and times manually for each clip!

MikeCWest wrote:

Ken,

Could you share that work around?

If I try to use the one Luis posted, and the RT Generators, all times factors increase. I obviously want my video to display the time in "realtime" as it would on my video camera. If i have a 30 second clip, all of the following progress, month, day, year, hours, minutes, seconds. Years go by on the display on my 15 second clip.

I am perfectly fine with your method of taking the osx attributes and subtracting the clipl length, although I think it would be more accurate to start from the creation time and add to it?

Is there a way to set the time code to move up only by seconds?

It's been awhile for me on this thread but I'm pretty sure it already counts by seconds if you follow Luis' instructions for creating it or you can create and publish the parameters, so I'm not sure what you're not understanding. You set the start and ending time in the parameters and away it goes.

I'm not using the OSX attributes, I'm using the time stamp from the clip itself (from the camera).

If you're working with one continous clip with no edits, it is fairly simple and accurate. On the other hand if you are using a bunch of disconnected clips, it would be very tedious to set the generator for each one.

An idea I have off the top of my head is that if you have one long clip that your cutting up into segments and perhaps not using them all. Open the original clip in the timeline and apply the time generator for the entire clip, compound it, and then use it to cut your video together. I haven't tried this, it may try to re-render it once you start cutting it and totally blow the time. I guess to get around that you would export the clip with the time generator to a .mov, reimport it and use it with the running clock already embedded in it to do the edits.

Have to try that when I get the chance.

Of course the simplest way is to have the camera show the date/time when recording (if your camera does that).

My camera uses huge blocky characters for this so I much prefer the generator. Plus I don't want the original video to have an unremovable date stamp on it, unless it's for a specific purpose.

Yes, That is the problem. My projects are always a series of disconnected clips. They will be at minimum a 5 second clip every thirty minutes. There will also be various clips of unpredictable lengths and time in between. I don't know in advance what I will be filming.

It is extremely tedious to enter a start and end time of each and every clip. I can accomplish it on the PC using Sony Vegas with SVDTS.DLL. I find it hard to believe that on the Mac it is nearly impossible to accomplish this task in an efficient manner.