Im trying to achieve a stopwatch effect in Adobe Premiere Pro v7.0

I want it to stop at a certain point in the video

Any ideas?


Many Thanks

How do you mean stopwatch? Not the universal counting leader I guess?

tonga

just a timer.

when the video starts - the timer starts, and vice versa.

seems simple idea but cant for the life of me figure out how to do it

Not tried this before, but I remember reading on a similar forum to this once... I'm sure there's an easier way. Basically, the guy suggested creating separate image files in photoshop or whatever. You would have to create the separate numbers (i.e. minutes, seconds etc.) as separate layers. Then export one image for each second (e.g. 01, 02, 03...58, 59). And one for each minute that you'll be going up to. You will then need to create an extra couple of video layers in Premiere. You can leave each of the 'minute' images stretched out over a minute, however, the second images you will need to change for every second (sounds very tedious) it's probably easiest to do this by setting the default still image duration to 1 second. You'll have to make sure that you have transparency set on all of the images (use paste attributes to do this).

Sounds horribly time consuming, but I'm sure it would work well. I guess the important thing is to make sure the numbers all line up when you create them in photoshop.

Yeah that was the only way I could think of. I wondered if there was an easier method within premiere or if an animated .gif image inserted would do it?

I've not tried inserting animated gif's into Premiere, but I would be surprised if it worked. Correct me if I'm wrong. However, it is quite possible that the program that you might be using to export animated gifs would also be able to export to a video file (e.g. .mov). For example, I use Flash to do any simple animations in my videos and export the animation as a video file (such as .mov) which I can then import into Premiere. I'm not sure of a quicker way of making a counter in Flash than Premiere though, so we're back where we started!!

Come to think of it,
There must be someone out there in the big bad world of internet-dom who has done this already. I've done a quick search on google and haven't come up with what you're after yet, however there were lots of hits, so I reckon if you fiddle with your search, you should be able to find it. The biggest problem will be finding a video file for which transparency can easily be set. If you don't find it in a couple of days, let me know and I'll sit down and I should be able to do something up in about an hour, because it's something that I'll probably use in the future at some stage anyway. If you do find something, let us know where it is.

Dunno if this might work but if you have a camera which can overlay the video clock and burn it into the footage then just set the clock to midnight and run the camera with the lens cap on. Needs the camera to be able to overlay the time in seconds as well as hours and minutes though....

You'll get a clock/counter down in the corner on a black video. Capture that and chroma key the black out.

Just thinking out loud so flame away if it's not practical.

__________________
I'm not young enough to know everything!

I've just tried overlaying the clock and timecode, to no avail :(

Also, I havent been able to find anything on the net. Making an image file for every second would work, but I want milliseconds too, so it stops on the exact time.

This guy has a timecode movie available to download on his web site. It's an hour long.

http://www.video2stream.com/

It looks like it's NTSC so 29/30 fps. For PAL users we should be able to mask it off to get the seconds and minutes bit I suppose.

It might do the job.

__________________
I'm not young enough to know everything!