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

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11 replies

Jul 2, 2016 7:54 PM in response to David Bogie Chq-1

In essence? What the arrow is pointing to. I want to be able to have the time (which I can fish out of the EXIF data or whatever passes for such on video files) accurately represented on screen and counting upward one minute every minute. Presumably going from 59 minutes to 00 minutes and the hour incrementing appropriately if I end up rolling from one hour to the next in the course of my video.

User uploaded file

Jul 2, 2016 11:23 PM in response to Joseph Guendert

You can try this:

Time SCTitle

User uploaded file


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.)

Jul 2, 2016 11:25 PM in response to fox_m

Awesome! I'll run a test as soon as I get back home. I'm thinking that if it picks up time based on the time/day of import... if I turn off the time syncing and manually set my laptop's clock to the date/time of when I took the videos, I can probably use that to fool things into working? Considering this is all for a dumb joke that my friend are doing with footage from a comic con next weekend, I'm probably putting far too much effort into this... but I've learned stranger things in FCPX for stupider reasons...

Jul 3, 2016 6:37 PM in response to fox_m

That'll teach me to have Siri read me emails with technical stuff in them while I drive. I thought you said it only would operate based on the import date/time. As for pulling the proper information from the videos, that's easy enough to suss out since for this experiment, I'm going to be playing with two iPhones and a GoPro. The GoPro's timer is set off your phone the first time you sync the app up, and iPhones are set off the cell towers. I might be off by a millisecond or two but that's close enough for me.


I threw together a practical test using a pair of videos that were sitting around in my phone. Looks good, although I think I'm going to need to update my on-screen graphics to get them closer to CNN's. I think I used an old clip to build mine from. Boo. Oh well. Thanks for everything, guys, you've been AWESOME with helping me through this.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC7-4uWIbrM

Jul 14, 2016 11:19 AM in response to fox_m

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxMhU8lIM9U


Final version! Thanks for all your help; I basically set up each title using the time code embedded at the start of the file and then did simple addition to see what the end time should be. Then when I sped the file up, I could just drag the title's size down to match and the time would move at 250% speed with the footage so the clock stayed accurate.

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Add the time to a video?

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