Creating and Customising a Timer in Davinci Resolve 18

creating a timer just like this in the free version and Studio versions of DaVinci Resolve 18. it's super quick and easy so let me show you how to make it and how to customize it so from the edit page within DaVinci Resolve the first thing you need to do open up the effects Library by clicking on effects top left hand corner then within the toolbox come to titles and at the very top of titles you want the bottom option here the text plus grab the text plus and pop it on your timeline like so let's make that a little bit longer then we simply give that a click so it's highlighted in red on the timeline and then open the inspector top right hand corner make sure you're on the video title text tabs which you should do by default and then you'll see your text box here to create the timer simply right click within this box and then come down to time code and that's it if we now put my playhead at the beginning of this text Plus on the timeline hit play we now have a real simple timer we have hours minutes seconds and then frames now this is adjustable so we can make it as long or as short as we need to be quick tip though if you need to make it longer make sure you don't move the start of the text plus because if you move that back you'll end up in minus numbers so you want to move the text plus where you want it and then drag it from the the right hand side to make it longer or shorter and then we've got an automatic timer that does exactly what we want see super quick and easy but what about if you want to customize it well this is a standard Text Plus so you can adjust the font the color the size in exactly the same way you usually would so with the text plus selected in the inspector scroll down and we've got things like font so we can change the font we can change the color the size the tracking the spacing all that sort of stuff if you go to the layout tab you can then change the position if the X and Y to get it in exactly the place that you want it there's also size and there's loads of rotation controls and other controls within there here's a real quick tip for you if you've chosen a font which does this it sort of jitters as a jittery sort of effect that's because your font changes size as the numbers change so certain numbers are wider than others which gives you this jittery sort of effect to fix that scroll down until you get to this H anchor and then click on the left most icon that will justify it over to the left hand side so now if we hit play there's no jittering whatsoever you will need to just change the layout to bring it back into the center but now as you can see it's playing through super smooth see easy but what about if you want to turn off the hours the minutes the seconds or the frames well you can do that too but you do need to hop into Fusion don't worry though that's really easy as well all you need to do from the edit page make sure you've got your text plus still selected in the inspector you've got this sort of magic wand icon in the top right hand corner give that a click and that should take you directly into Fusion you should see your timer in the preview window if for whatever reason you don't see the timer just jump back to the edit page and click that icon again and it should work sometimes it can do slightly odd things and not work first time round so how do you turn off these hours and minutes well make sure you've got the inspector open as I have here and we can see all of the standard Text Plus controls at the very top we have modifiers give that a click and then we have some time code controls within here if we simply untick ours it will get rid of the hours we can untick minutes seconds and then just have the frames or tick any others that we want so I'm just going to go with minutes seconds and Frames so if we hit play jump down now you've also got frames per second down here this will pull through automatically from your project settings but you can adjust it manually if you want to but that will of course affect the timing you've then also got start offset so at the moment my timer starts from zero but if I wanted it to start further ahead I can increase this now a quick note this is in frames so you need to do some maths if I wanted this to start at two seconds for example my frames per second is 25 so my start offset would be 50 and now it starts at two seconds here's a bonus Fusion tip for those interested if you wanted to be super clever and you didn't want to have to do the maths yourself right click on the word start offset and come down to expression then grab this little plus icon and drag it to the frames per second and it'll all through your frames per second and then simply do a multiplied by and then however many seconds you want so if I wanted this to start at 12 seconds I could type in 12 and now it's going to start at 12. if I wanted it to be 20 I could do 20 and it will automatically do the Maths for us there you go just a quick bonus expression tip awesome so we've customized it we've got it looking exactly as we want it but what if we wanted to either slow it down or speed it up because we were doing maybe a time lapse or something like that where you can do that too but you need to go back to the edit page and you need to do this using a compound clip if you've never heard of compound Clips I've made a whole video about those in the past so go check that out but for now let's jump back onto the edit page and I'll show you what you need to do so I'm just going to reset my timer really quick so I want it to start back from zero once again so I'm going to right click on start offset remove the expression and then double click on start offset to go back to zero so we've reset our timer now let's jump back over to the edit page and my timer is timing me going down this mountain bike run so the first thing I want to do is to make sure my timer is the same length as my footage like so so then it's timing me all the way down to the bottom now as you can see currently is all going in real time but let's say I don't want this to take two minutes I want to speed everything up well what you need to do is highlight both of the things on your timeline so my main footage and my timer then we can right click and we're going to new compound clip give this a name I'm gonna go with bike you run and then hit correct and that's going to package the actual footage and the timer into one thing on your timeline then really simply give it a click on your timeline open up the inspector scroll down to speed change and then you have your speed change controls within here so I'm going to set this to be 200 and now if we hit play the timer and the footage are all running at 200 so everything it's still in sync but we've sped it up if you need to get into this compound clip to make any changes to the location of the timer for example you simply right click on the compound clip on your timeline and go to open in Timeline this will open up that box that compound clip then you can select the text plus let's just change the layout to put this down at the bottom somewhere like so then at the very bottom of your screen you'll see timeline one and then the name of your compound clip we can just double click on the timeline one to go back to our main timeline and now our timer has changed but everything is still running at the 2x speed we can change this as much as we like we could increase this to 500 or we could increase it to 50 to run slow motion whatever we want it to do easy now last but not least what if you want that timer to run backwards well it's essentially doing the same thing you do have to use a compound clip but it is once again quick simple and easy so for this one we're actually just going to create another timer so I'm going to grab my text plus put out my timeline give it a click in the inspector right click within the text box and we're going to go to time code or move my playhead and there we go if you want to make this a very particular length which you probably do for a countdown simply right click on the Text Plus on the timeline and you can click on change clip duration or there's a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl and D from here here you can set the actual duration so let's say I want mine to be 30 seconds we'll pop 30 in there hit change and we know it's going to be exactly 30 seconds long so now to reverse it we need to create a compound clip once again right click the Text Plus on the timeline then go to new compound clip I'm just going to call this one reverse and create now we have a compound clip which just Counts from 0 to 30 but now it's a compound once again we can go into the speed change area and we can change the direction from forward facing to backwards facing this middle icon here now it's playing backwards and it's going to go from 30 and count down all the way to zero we can't make this any longer currently because it's only 30 seconds long but once again if we want to make any changes to that timer we can right click open in the timeline to get access to the actual Text Plus let's make this a little bit longer then we can drill back to our timeline make this longer now because it's reversed we make sure to drag from the left hand side rather than the right hand side and now we have a longer timer which counts all the way back and there you go now if you want to save these timers to the effects Library so that they're ready to go every single time watch this video up here where I show you how to save effects to the effects Library awesome thanks for watching though take it easy I'll see you next time

Channel: MrAlexTech

Views: 33,093

Keywords: MrAlexTech, Mr Alex Tech

Id: dcUxhWjMIx8

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023