How to Add a Countdown Timer to Zoom (OBS & Ecamm)

have you ever wanted to add a countdown timer to your zoom call maybe you want to let people know exactly how much time they have before you're starting your presentation maybe you have a break built into your session and you want people to know exactly when you are going to resume or perhaps you've done something like i have in the past where you have a timed activity and you want people to know exactly how much time they have to do that activity these are all some of the examples that i'm going to show and i'm going to show you how to set this up so today's episode is all about countdown timers for zoom now before i get into this i do want to share that i'm not actually going through the steps to connect your virtual camera from your streaming software into zoom that's how we're doing this if you haven't seen the video yet on how to do that you can ch check on the link in the description and see exactly how to connect something like obs or ecam a streaming software using the virtual camera in zoom and that's how we can add these overlays and these countdown timers so what i'm going to show today is how do you actually set up your countdown timer and then how can you add graphics to it and i'm even going to show you an example of how you can create an animation to go with your countdown timers so i'm pretty excited about today's episode i think it's going to be fun if you are here i'm seeing a few of these messages come through but please let me know do you use countdown timers have you done this yet have you incorporated in zoom or maybe you have been on a zoom call where they have incorporated countdown timers so if you are new around here and you don't know who i am my name is kat and i help people to create more professional and engaging online presentations i really want us to do better by the people in our zoom calls so that they're not boring and that they feel fully engaged now before we get into all of the countdown timer fun i did want to say that if you are here on this channel watching this there's a good chance that you are someone who's invested in really elevating the quality of your presentation so i'm really excited to share that i'm actually launching a new version of my elevate your online presentations training so this is a live training all of the details you can get them both in the description below or going to catmulvahill.com elevate so this is actually going to take place over four sessions so you learn a little bit at a time you get to practice implement test it out and then come back and you can get that real time in person well on zoom feedback and so this is a great opportunity and anyone who joins not only will you actually get some graphic download packs including countdown timers you're also going to get access to my brand new community where i'm going to do monthly question and answer periods for any of the students who take my training so go and check that out if that is something that you are looking to do if you want that extra bit of customized help and to get some of that feedback all right so let's get into this this is we're going to talk about countdown timers so the examples that i think of and this is what i think when i'm using a countdown timer i might use it at the start this is especially helpful if you know how when you have a zoom call people kind of take their time getting onto the call not everyone is usually signed on exactly in time to start that's just the reality that we live in so occasionally what i will do is choose the actual start time maybe it's a few minutes after but whatever you do pick that and then you start your countdown timer so maybe you started 10 minutes before you start before most people are signing on and then when they show up they can actually see oh okay this is exactly how much time i have and then if somebody signs on let's say a minute or two late they'll actually see that the presentation hasn't actually started yet now if you are coming from the outside and someone else is hosting the call talk to them in advance say that hey i might use this countdown timer is that okay and let's decide the start time that we actually want if you are not the one running the meeting also breaks this is a great way for people to know exactly how much time is left especially if you are across different time zones you might say okay it's this time now let's meet again at this time well if you have a countdown timer it just takes the guesswork out of it someone can just look at their screen and see exactly how much time is left so i really love count on timers for breaks and then the other is timed activities maybe you are asking someone to go and do something to write something down to come up with an idea you can tell them exactly how much time they have to do the activity and the bonus is that because you are using a graphic you can actually have the instructions on the screen right beside the timer and i'm going to show you an example of how you can do this and kind of have some fun with it so those are some of the reasons are there any other reasons that you might see using a countdown timer because these are some of the ways that that i use them and what i might recommend the other thing is that i don't actually use countdown timers in the majority of my zoom calls typically if i'm having a zoom call and meeting with a group i don't worry about setting up a countdown timer it's not always necessary but you do want to think who is your audience who is going to be in this meeting and would they benefit from having a countdown timer is it going to help their experience because if you're just meeting with a group of people on zoom you don't need to count down to tell them when they're going to start but if it is a more formal presentation and you're maybe you don't know the group and it's it's more of a production that's where i would probably think to put this type of thing into your production so how does this look what are some examples so one is an example where you can actually have the timer on the screen with you so here you can see i've got a countdown timer it says exactly when we're going to start if somebody were to join the call they could see exactly how much time is here and i have it set so that as soon as i land on this scene it will start counting down so it's sort of automatically set i don't have to start the timer it will do it as soon as i go to that countdown timer screen and this having it beside you while you are on screen is a nice way to be able to engage with the people who are starting you can say welcome write your name in the chat you can kind of give them instruction you can ask them how their day is doing but they can always see when the presentation is starting let's look at another example so here is where you might actually say okay it's break time and then you can tell people exactly when they are going to want to come back so anytime they glance at their screen they're going to see that it's break time and they know exactly how much time is left now let's look at an activity example so this is actually something i have done before with some of my classes that i've hosted where i have a very specific activity and i list the instructions on the screen while i'm still here so you can see that i'm still here it's this picture and picture concept so i will actually walk through the instructions now having the written instructions is really good for people who don't process information auditorially that sounded weird but we have people who are more visual so for them to be able to see the instructions is helpful also if you say the instructions once or maybe even twice often people will stop and it's time to do that the exercise and they think wait what are we doing now i know i have absolutely been guilty of that so you can have these instructions and you can actually walk through maybe you can answer a question but then when it's actually time to do the activity this is where you can take yourself off the screen and you can have your countdown timer the thing that i love about this is that you are not a distraction people don't see you kind of waiting for the five minutes while they do their exercise or activity in this way it's kind of nice that you remove that now yes there is a clock counting down but if a person wants to refer back to the instructions they can do that they can also see exactly how much time is left so this is an example of how you might get creative with doing something like a timed activity so those are some examples so let's actually get into how do you actually set them up so there are two components to your timer there is the actual countdown which is built into your streaming software so if you're using something like ecam or obs and those are the two that i'll show you you are setting that timer up in that software the other component is your graphics and that is where you can get creative you can add whatever you like and i'm going to show you how to create a couple of those animations but this is where you have you want to bring those two components together so first let's focus on setting up the timer so i am going to do a demo mode and before i do that i just want to make sure everyone's going to be able to see this because i recognize that my demo mode on my computer is often really large so let's enlarge this for you there we go that's better okay so i'm going to show you my screen and let's pop into live demo mode so here is my primary display and this is where i have ecamm running and let's actually just move this over a little okay so this is my ecamm demonstration so right now i have nothing on this scene and i am going to add my countdown timer now the countdown timer just like any other graphic this is an overlay and so in ecamm if you come down to the left part of my screen you will see a little three two one that is your countdown timer when you click that in ecamm you will see that it starts counting down you can change the colors and i'm going to change this to five minutes as soon as i change it in this duration then you'll see the option in the countdown this is where you can also start to set your fonts so you can choose which font you want you can choose your thickness maybe you want that to be a little bit lighter a little bit thicker and you can also adjust the size now you can adjust the size here where you can make it a little bit smaller or bigger but you can also do that directly on the screen the other thing is that you have a few options so you could add a background if you wanted to you can change the the radius of the background etc you can add a shadow there are different types so i choose countdown for an amount of time because that is what we are doing in this example and you can also in ecamm click this button if you want to go to the next scene as soon as this is finished so for example my countdown timer i use before my live streams is set to go to the next screen or next scene as soon as it is finished so this is a nice option to have you can check that off and so let's do this and we're going to say add so now you can see that the time pops up on my screen and i can position it wherever i like and this is just a simple example now i don't have a graphic right now like you saw in the examples we can add a graphic separately but this is how you set up your timer in ecamm so now let's leave demo mode and i'm going to show you in obs how you set up obs so here we have a blank scene i have nothing else on this scene and we are going to add the countdown timer in obs so we are going to first in obs what you have to do is actually add some text as a placeholder to tell obs where you want your countdown timer to go so we are going to add some text i'm actually going to call this timer placeholder because that's what it is and here we see this giant timer now my timer's actually already set up which is not ideal let's actually let's cancel this and i'm going to give it a different name because i was practicing obviously i was practicing for all of you because i want to do this right so let's call this um t p one time timer placeholder one and now we have a blank slate because i didn't already set this one up so this one let's write timer and this is where you can select the font do you want to change this do you want this to be lighter do you want the size to go down let's make it a little bit smaller and you can choose the color what color do you want it to be all of this is done in the text so this is where you're deciding what your timer actually looks like so now we have this on the screen i'm just going to place this in the middle here's our timer placeholder so the next step is that we now want to bring in the timer and this is actually a tool so in obs you're going to click on tools at the top and you're going to click on scripts which i realize my face is covering but it's scripts that is what you're going to pick so now this scripts window shows up here and because i have already set up a countdown timer before it says countdown.lua the first time you do this it's not going to be there so what you will do is you'll click plus and the plus will actually open your open your file folder and bring you to exactly where the built-in obs scripts live and you will see countdown dot that is what you are going to choose and then it will be here in your loaded script now you're going to choose the duration so let's say one minute maybe we just want to test one minute here is where you want to check where what's the text source so tp1 that is what i want and you can actually see before i've even closed it that a timer has started and there's another thing in obs called final text which is what do you want to display when it's over and i've played around with a few different options so i personally put 0.00 as the final thing to show up and i'll tell you why in a second it's because we use cropping now let's say close so now we have our timer it is counting down i put it to one minute but personally i think this is kind of ugly i don't want all those extra zeros but if you have used obs before you know that you can crop so if you either use alt on a pc or option on mac this is where you can hold that down and drag this in and you can crop when it comes to the time i usually like to click away to make sure i didn't accidentally so sometimes when you think you've cut off everything but when you go away you see a little bit more and actually the timer just lets we want to restart this so let's go to the scene and go back so now we've got this one minute so let's make sure if i click off this you can see a little bit of that zero so now i want to click on it hold down option or alt and just come in a little bit tighter and when i click away i can now see a timer that i think looks better so this and then you can place the timer wherever it's going to be on your page so that is how you set this up so remember to put your placeholder using text format the text and if you want to change it maybe we want this to be a different font we can go in here and we can pick whichever font we want and update it oh that went wrong maybe don't do that that's that that's on me for playing around and i probably shouldn't do that so let's go back let's say okay practice it's all about practice right so this is how you set it up and as a reminder when your scenes are all ready you want to start your virtual camera here in the right and this will be this is where you're going to connect your virtual camera to zoom okay and i see sammy is laughing and totally deserved because that was that was a goof um okay so now let's talk about the graphics because those were just the timers which is the first component and those are connected to your streaming software so now we want to make it look pretty so we want to add some sort of graphic so you have seen probably a lot of countdown timers that had something that was looping an animated graphic so you don't have to have an animation you know we saw on the example if we go back for a second to this screen i didn't have an animation this was just a static image with some text with the instructions and i didn't actually have to do that but if you want it to look a little bit more fun so maybe you want to have something in the corner like this where you have a little bit of an animation you can do that so we are going to show how you can actually add those in so first let's go to our ecamm demo and i'm going to go back to this one where i set up the timer but i don't have a graphic so what i can do here is i can add and i'm going to add an animated one so let's click on the plus and i'm going to my my window is not cooperating so here we of course it's not because this is the day i'm having all right i'm going to go into my folder where i have all my countdown timers and you know what you should be able to see this so let's actually go into demo mode wouldn't that help so let's go into demo mode for ecam i've moved this screen around a little bit so that i can access this but i'm going to in overlays click on this this one down here the second one is an animated overlay which brings open this window and i have a folder called countdown timers and here's a timer that i'm actually going to show you how i made it in a moment so let's open this so here we have this countdown timer and this is actually i positioned this on a 16x9 so i'm going to position it over here let's do it there and then i'm going to take my countdown timer and move it here but all of a sudden it disappeared behind and that's because in your overlays it will always stack the thing on the top of the stack is going to be the thing that shows up first so right now my circle overlay is above my timer so i want to drag this circle down so that the time is on top and then we can just kind of do this and if we wanted to have words i can add a text overlay so that is an option that i would have available to me now it stopped looping so you might have noticed that it started to loop so i play this video and i've got the circles going but i want that to keep going so on ecamm you want to have this little this little drop down here and i want to loop this so i want to make sure autoplay is selected so that when i go to this scene it will start running this movie this short short movie but i also want it to loop around so that when i get to this scene it will play so let's go back if we go back to this screen setting my timer and then i switch to my ecamm demo now you can see that has started looping and it will continue to loop and if i exit live demo mode now you can see that i have this countdown timer we've got this animated graphic and we've got the time in it so those are the two components that go together and if you have that animation you want it to actually loop on the screen so that's an example with ecamm now i see i've got a few a few comments here and thank you so much for people who are joining i see andy's here um alexis am i saying that right patrick and thank you that circle timer i am going to show you how to make that in a moment all right so now let's go into obs so in obs here so this has stopped but we are going to set up our graphic so in this in this case i'm going to take a graphic and i'm actually just going to drag the drag and drop is is an option if you have a file nearby you can just drag it and drop it so let's say that we are going to have a break and i'm going to put a countdown timer graphic i'm just dragging it on here from my file folder now that was a short graphic and it disappeared because it's not looping so let's open this source and we want to make sure that it loops so we check off loop and we want to uncheck show nothing when playback ends because we don't want it to disappear like it just did so we have this movie file and then we click ok so now we have this graphic here and we have our timer which has run out and so what i want to do i'm going to just switch to the scene and switch back we can see the countdown timer start and then i can go over here and i can position it same thing's happening where the actual graphic is covering the timer so let's grab the graphic and drag it down so now the timer is actually over top and then you can just kind of position the pieces that you want and once you've got them where you want them i can you want to lock those so now what will happen is whenever somebody when you go from one scene maybe it's just you on the camera and then you go to this break it will start counting down from the time that you set up and you have your looping graphic so this is an example of how you can add your graphic which is the second component okay so a couple of things before i show you how to actually make i'm going to show two quick examples of how to make a graphic so the first thing i want to say is that if you are using the virtual camera and zoom which is what the lesson is intended for to bring this timer into your zoom call first i really want you to make use of the spotlight option so that you are in speaker mode and that you are pinned for all of the people who are coming in if you are not the host of the session ask your host to spotlight you so that everyone can see the countdown timer it's not in a tiny little square the other thing is you want to make sure that if you have any text on there make it big because as the as you may know and if you don't i have a video about this resolution and zoom is degraded a little bit so you might have a nice looking graphic but the other people can't see it as clearly so try to make things as big as possible the op the other option so you can toggle on group hd so you can have 720 as your resolution in your zoom window but you can also if you have a business account or education account you might have the option to bump that up to a 1080 a higher resolution or if you have the setup which i teach in the fixing your blurry virtual camera video you can also share your screen and have this graphic going on the screen share which will be the resolution of your monitor so that those are some tips that i want you to consider when it comes to showing this graphic you don't want really tiny print because it might be blurry for the people on your call so let's make a graphic and there are two simple ways that i'm going to show you well one one is really simple the other takes a little bit of work but i'm going to show you so that you feel like yeah that's simple i can do that so the first is canva now canva there are paid accounts the pro account and there's a free account and so i'm going to go into here and just say create a design and i'm going to do an instagram story now the reason i'm picking this is that an instagram story could make a really good sidebar and so that is what i want to do here is to make this sidebar so let's this is how easy it is you could change the background color of this to whatever you want maybe i just want it to be a light color and then under elements in canva i want you to search circle which i recently searched and then here on your preferences click animated and if you don't have the paid account you could click free let's see what's available for free apply the filters and here are all sorts of these animated circles and i actually i liked this one and this is sort of what inspired part of that pink one that you saw and what we're going to make and so here's an example where you could put some text on the top and say break we will resume in we will start in and then you can have the countdown timer placed here when you go to download this you can also change how long this is if you want to make it even shorter and then you download this as a movie file so that is one really simple option let me know if you are here in the chat if you use canva and if this is something that you would consider doing i think that this is a really easy way to make a sidebar or you could also make it the full screen so let's say you actually want it to cover the whole screen in canva just make sure that you're picking that wide dimension the 16x9 ratio and then you can put your instructions you can put your countdown timer and you can have this animation really really fast so you don't have to worry about any of that okay so now let's look at a different example where i want to show you keynote so and yes i am aware this is for mac users only i tried powerpoint it's just not that great so if you are a powerpoint user and you don't have keynote i just recommend that you go to canva or maybe buy a countdown timer but for now i'm going to show you keynote because this is how we can make this graphic so i am going to show you how to make this and i just need to move a few of these things out of the way um andy thank you so much i love the way you actually show us how to make these things yeah you can make them and it really is not overly complicated so as i said before i want to sort of recreate the one that i just showed you on canvas so you are going to have a few components you want to have a solid circle and then two moving circles so let's just go into shape i'm going to drag a circle and if you want it to stay a circle hold down shift and drag it it will maintain that ratio and we can drop it and let's pick a color so i'm let's just recreate the one that i made earlier so here we have the circle now what i'm actually going to do is just duplicate this object so now i have a second circle so we can actually name this if you have your object list up so i can say solid circle and then this one is going to be the outer the out yeah outer ring sounds like space so this one though the outer ring we are going to have that have no fill we are going to have a border and i want this to be a line and i want this to be the same color but i'm going to drag it so i'm going to keep holding down shift and just make it a little bit bigger and then grab this and just drag drag it so it's outside so now i've got this outer ring now i want an inner ring so i am going to once again duplicate this ring i'm going to hold down shift i'm going to drag it in a little so it's smaller and we can adjust that later this one i want to be white and then i want to drag this and position it in the middle so now i have all of the components together now we are going to animate them now a strange thing about keynote with animation is that it wants to start it on the side here so we have to just arrange it so i'm going to give you the shortcut which is that you want to go into a range and your inner circle let's say we want the inner circle to start from the top the animation so we're just going to say 45 degrees so now it's turned so this will actually the animation will start from the top for our outer ring which you can select out here or on here we are going to do 225 which is basically 180 plus 45 so 225 and so now this one will start from the bottom so that's how i've decided to do it and that's just what i recommend 40 45 and 225 we'll have one starting on the top and one starting in the bottom so now let's animate it so we've got the outer ring already selected so let's animate this so we go over to the top right click animate we are going to add an effect called line draw which is the one that i just if let me know if you know that this is available in powerpoint because i i couldn't find it so line draw if we preview this it actually draws the line around the circle and you can play around with whether you want it to ease in or not and how long you want this to happen i'm just going to leave it as is for the just to keep this short so i've got this line draw now let's click on the inner ring which i actually want to rename inner ring so the inner ring we are going to build an effect called line draw and now you see the line draw we can preview that and see it going around so let's go outer ring preview starts from the bottom and then our inner ring so if we click on build order in the bottom this is where we can make all of this animation go together so we actually want these to be connected so i want i just drag that up here and i actually want the inner ring and the outer ring to start at the same time so i want to say start with build one so that outer and inner we'll actually do this together so if we preview this we can see that they are drawing they start drawing at the same time and they're just going in different directions so now let's say we want these to build out so i am going to click on the outer ring and we're going to have a build out action which is going to be the line draw again so it's going to draw it but it's going to disappear i'm going to drag that up here so now we've got but we actually do want this after the second build and now we click on the inner ring and we want this to be a build out we're going to add a line draw and there you see it and now we drag it up here but this one i want the outer and inner to leave together so let's preview this animation so you can see you're drawing it they start from different ones and then they both disappear and then we can just loop this over and over so this is how you make the animation in keynote but now i want to make sure that i've got a transparent background so i click off so that nothing is selected and i go to format and in background on this right we want to say no fill now we have that transparent background you can also move this shape around if you want or you can even adjust the background this doesn't have to be 16x9 you can actually make it a square that's a nice option so you have a bit more freedom with moving this graphic around so we are going to now export this to a movie file and here is where you want to make sure that you so it's a movie file it's going to be self playing i get rid of these and just say zero seconds and you want this to be a custom resolution and you want this to be apple prores 4444 and make sure export with transparent backgrounds is checked if you don't see this it means you haven't turned your background transparent so let's now say next now we are exporting this and so we want this i'm going to put this in my countdown timer folder and i'm going to call this one pink double circles 2 because i've already made this one and then we export it so now we have exported it and this is what you see when i uh let's see i think this is no this is it so this is this is what it looks like when you actually bring that in as an animated overlay so i hope that that was something that you see you can actually imagine yourself doing and making these animations it's not as complicated as it seems and you can get creative you can look for inspiration you can go to canva and say oh i want to recreate that and play around with it and there are a lot of people online who teach this stuff and do a great job now i see that there is a question so let's take a look at this question will this type of timer be possible to use with ms teams as well so you can use the virtual camera with microsoft teams but you'll have to check compatibility so a couple of the the downsides that i have experienced coming into the microsoft teams platform so i can use the the virtual camera but because it sometimes changes the ratio like sometimes it'll squeeze you into a box so i've been doing a presentation and people said uh we can't actually see your entire presentation so part of my slides were cut off but if you had the timer positioned in a way that you knew it wasn't going to be cut off and then you just want to check which one you have so always always always test and if in doubt just google using their virtual camera with ms teams and they'll usually give you some troubleshooting often what happens is that they will release an update and then suddenly a virtual camera is not working anymore but my main thing with microsoft teams is that you want to make sure that it's the ratio that people can actually see it and to my knowledge i don't know that you can kind of stick with the the wide the 16x9 but please correct me if i'm wrong it's not something i use very often and usually if someone invites me to present to teams i'll usually ask them if it's an option to use zoom because of this ratio but it's possible it could have been updated since answering that question so i'm just going to check and see are there any other so patrick is saying in powerpoint you can do some line drawing but i don't think you can do it with circles um you can do it with a square it's not as simple as keynote thank you so much for sharing that that's really helpful to know i did i looked around i really want to support my powerpoint people so that's why i wanted to show you canva because canva does have free options available that you can export you cannot export the canva with a transparent background because it's an animation it's a movie file but you could use the chroma key so if you haven't seen that i've got that in a few other videos where i show you how to use the chroma key basically the green screen background so you could apply that approach and then you can just get rid of the background that would be obs for ecam i don't think you can green screen and overlay so you would want to be doing that only if you're using obs and uh hi yuli arts am i saying that right hello from canada um okay any other so thank you andy for saying this is helpful just want to make sure there are no other questions and if there are questions i'm always happy to answer them i do like answering questions so if it ever seems like i'm just wrapping things up really quickly it's usually because i don't see any questions and i don't want to just ramble because that is something that i am prone to do all right so if you are hopefully you are excited about this and you are going to go and try out using your countdown timer remember that if you have not connected a virtual camera before i have the video description linked or i have the video link just in the description below so you can check that out and also do remember if you want to do some training i am my live training is coming up it's four sessions and it's going to be amazing so i really hope that if this is something you want to get better at that you will consider joining me and all the information is linked in the description below so all the best thanks so much for those of you who join me today i will see you next time you

Channel: Cat Mulvihill

Views: 24,415

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Id: FN9pG2UaIP0

Length: 36min 15sec (2175 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021