Q: Add the time to a video?
I've been a long-time amateur tinkering with FCP X and so my overall knowledge base is admittedly minimal, but I can't seem to find what I feel should be a very simple answer. What's the easy way to add the time to a video clip? To put it in context, I've assembled all the overlays for a faux-news broadcast as part of a project that I'm working on but short of adding a separate transparent PNG that fills in the time and needs to be replaced every minute throughout the video... I have no idea. I just need "1:59 PM EDT", "2:00 PM EDT", "2:01 PM EDT", et cetera.
MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)
Posted on Jul 2, 2016 12:51 PM
You can try this:
Time SC Title
These are the published parameters:
Position and Scale (to help place the Time in the scene).
You must set the time in Start (the date can be ignored — it is not used in this effect)
You must set the time in End.
The title is designed at 1 minute in length. The time End is the last frame so when you stretch this out
in the Storyline, you must calculate the amount of time passed (or the amount of time you *want* to pass [for effect])
and set that in End
The rest are fairly self-explanatory.
To change the Time Zone (e.g. EDT) to any other, double click on the text in the viewer and type in your change.
The text is set at Arial Narrow. You will need Motion to change that uniformly since the TZ is plain text and the Time is a Date/Time generator.
The Date/Time Title in FCPX gets the time from when you added your clips to the Event Browser. There doesn't seem to be a way to change which time it picks up. If you put a clip in a compound clip, then the Date/Time title takes the time from the moment you created the compound (which is the same time it gets added to the Event Browser ). You at least have the power to manually set the time in Time SC.
Hope you find it useful. Let me know how it works out (I kinda threw it together.)
Posted on Jul 2, 2016 11:23 PM

