ADVICE: Video editing - on-screen stopwatch/timer

[Timmay]

I'm knees deep in editing a wedding video at the moment, and before the best man's speech, everyone had secretly run a book on how long it was going to last. In the video, I want to fade in a small stopwatch in the corner somewhere, which lasts for the length of the speech, and stops when he's finished. With perhaps a cheesy little ding nicked from a boxing match.

I'm using Vegas 5, but can't see anything built in that might be able to acomplish this. Anyone know of a way to do it? Currently my *only* thought would be to get or make a timer/stopwatch video with black text on a white background, then I can overlay on another layer in Vegas, with the white being transparent. Problem with this is I think I might get some nasty fringing around the text as it does the overlay.

Anyone have any other ideas, or know of something that might be able to do the black text on white background stopwatch for me?

[untitled_london]

this guy wanted to do a similar thing.

i'd suggest adobe premiere....but, its quite a weighty application to use for what should be a simple task.

its probly worth holding out for a better reply.

[Purple Tentacle]

I'm afraid I'd suggest falling back on me old mate After Effects that uses transparancy layers as elegantly as Photoshop, but failing that I'd suggest creating a flash animation or whatever with a bright Lucas-green and just key that out normally, as long as the edges of the stopwatch animation are crisp and non-blurred it SHOULDN'T be a problem.

I'm afraid I've never used Vegas itself, but I shouldn't think the process is any different to every other editing programme on the planet.

I'm assuming you know how to set a transparancy key.

If you DO get artifacts around the clock there should be a "choking" function to smooth it out.

[Timmay]

Thanks guys. That article that mr london posted helped me. If I was thinking about it a bit more before, I should have realised that doing it using titles in Vegas, I don't need to have 60 titles per minute, 3600 titles per hour. I created 3 tracks, one for the minute digit, another for the 10 second digit (1x, 2x, 3x etc), and the other for the single second digit (x1, x2, x3 etc).

From a total of just 30 titles, by repeating/duplicating them, I can make a timer up 9:59 which does me nicely thank you.

[Timmay]

I've hit on another minor issue now.

I'm wanting to make it look delibrately over the top, so I want to display tenths of a second, and preferable hundredths too. Now, I'm no longer at a level where 1 second title will fit neatly into 25 frames - 1 tenth of a second title can't span 2.5 frames.

Currently I have got it so that .0 displays for 2 frames, 0.1 for 3 frames, 0.2 for 2 frames, 0.3 for 3 frames, and so on. This means they all fit into 1 second (25 frames), but they look jerky - you can tell the difference between the longer numbers, and the shorter ones.

How do I get around this? Is there some magic thing I can turn on in the editor which merges frames together or allows titles to span half frames or something?

EDIT: Oops, looks like I've killed my project file. I cut and pasted the 5000th consecutive title sequence, saved the file so I didn't lose all my hard work, zoomed right out to view the whole section, and Vegas died, and now I can't reopen the file.

EDIT2: Oh no, looks like it's back now. The project file has ballooned from 1.2MB to over 20MB with all those in. I need a bigger machine.

[Purple Tentacle]

Unless you increase the frame rate of your project, you can only have 25 "ticks" of the clock per second.

What I would suggest is creating a new composition with, say 100fps, creating your stopwatch, slap some motion blur on it and export it as 25fps... the blur should cover any jolts, and doing it that way will probably look better.

Make sure you do it as a seperate project however.