Timer / Stopwatch Overlay

[Guest]

Is there any way of adding a timer or stopwatch overlay onto a clip
Since I cannot find any obvious built-in facility to do this, are there any add-ons anywhere I can download/buy to do this
If not, does anyone know of any other (preferably free) products to do this

TIA
Andy Juniper

 

[John Kelly]

Hi there,

Regrettably no...Movie Maker can not do that. There may be third party programs
that can do it and as far as I am aware there is no add-on for MM that can do
it.

It must be premonition as I was thinking about this yesterday. If I can find
the necessary information I intend to write a small program to do this. Witting
the program will not be the problem, determining different formats (if such
exist) might be...so to begin with I will be limiting myself to the output from
my own camera...a Canon. If I do any good with it I will post a message here
and probably put it on my web site for free download.

Don't hold your breath though...it may be a while.

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

I've been thinking about timer overlays.... and last night made my first 12
second countdown clip from scratch..... there's a link to it on the Online >
Video page of www.papajohn.org

On Saturday I bought about 75 different watch faces at a garage sale. I took
a picture of each, made some textures for backgrounds, and used Photoshop to
add a hand. Made individual pix with the hand in each position, set the
option in MM2 to 1 second for still picture durations, added a sound effect,
etc.....

You can make a clip with a stopwatch and then overlay it in MM2 for a fading
transition... that would he easier. To have it stay as an overlay over a
clip that would be more work, like the overlay shown on the Do Amazing
Things > Part I > Chapter 2 > hot pix link > example exercise for an overlay

The bottom line is to use your camera, camcorder and software tools to do it
yourself.... it'll get lots of use, so it's worth the investment in time....
and it's fun.


PapaJohn

Is there any way of adding a timer or stopwatch overlay onto a clip?
Since I cannot find any obvious built-in facility to do this, are there

any add-ons anywhere I can download/buy to do this?

 

[PapaJohn \(MVP\)]

Andy,

MM2 only has one video track, so.... yes, it's a bit of work to get it to
simulate an overlaying track.

You can do it with Adobe Premiere....

PapaJohn

Thanks for that info.

If I understand it correctly, the only way to do this in MM2 is to

effectively create a "transition" which would contain just a (digital)
stopwatch with a transparent background which lasted as long as the clip?

This sounds like an aweful lot of work for something so simple. Are there

any tools outside of MM2 which might do this for me?

 

[John Kelly]

Hi there,

There are tools, but they come as part of very expensive software packages.

Since posting my last message on this subject I have created a basic program
for converting a video from one file type into another....there are loads of
bugs in it at the moment. Once they have been ironed out I will look at adding
the time date stamp directly to the video....what I am hoping to do is give the
option of where it is to appear (for obvious reasons).

I have to be away from home most of tomorrow afternoon and again Wednesday
morning....so I will not get another look at it until Thursday...keep watching
for a post on my success or failure.