editing a stopwatch into the corner of my dvd

[nvgs75guy]

Hi i am new to video editing but so far so good whith the easy strait forward stuff.

i am making a dvd about spearfishing freediving. i would like to put a digital stopwatch in the corner of my dvd. but not continuously .i want to start the timmer at the beginning of the dive and stop it at the end. each dive with a duration of about 2 minutes. there will be about 30 -40 stopwatch sesions in the dvd .how could i possibly do this. i have no clue.

[gadgetguy]

You'll want to create the stopwatch as a separate video and then overlay it on the frames where you want it to appear. There are many possible means of accomplishing this depending on what tools you have and how you want to have the effect appear. Like having it appear like a logo in a corner, fully opague or maybe semi-transparent, or you can have it appear as subtitles. You can have the stopwatch counting up or counting down. I've never done freedive spearfishing, is there some significance to the timing it?

[nvgs75guy]

nothing special all i want is a tiny digital stopwatch in the left hand bottom corner of my video. semi transparent or logo is fine.i just have no clue how to do it.
spearfishing and frediving is a sport done while holding your breath underwater. so having a timer on the screen will be a good refernce as to how long a diver has been down underwater. for us free divers and spearfishermen having a timer editted into the video will put the icing on the cake.it will be a nice refferenced addad to the video as to how long the diver has been underwater. our sport as based on how long you can hold your breath and how deep you can go. i would also like to edit depths of each dive into the opposit corner of the video. i think i know hoew to do that.

[greymalkin]

This shouldn't be hard to do at all. If you have a digital stopwatch just get a good clear closeup of the display with a camcorder. have a second or 2 at 00:00:00 and then hit the button to make it start counting..have it count a little over what you think the max time would be. This video clip can then be re-used for each "stopwatch" session you want.

Then you can import this clip into your video editing software, shrink it down to whatever size you want (premiere has a PiP plugin that can help you do this), place it in the corner and choose the opacity.

Then you can just insert the clip wherever you want the stopwatch to start counting, slide it around to get it precise. This is just my own personal preference, but I would have it fade in the corner right before it starts counting. When the dive is over, make the editing software hold that frame on the stopwatch for a few seconds and then have it fade away or disappear.

remember not to have the stopwatch sequence butted up against the edges of the screen as some of it may get "swallowed up" by overscan on an SDTV.

[greymalkin]

This shouldn't be hard to do at all. If you have a digital stopwatch just get a good clear closeup of the display with a camcorder. have a second or 2 at 00:00:00 and then hit the button to make it start counting..have it count a little over what you think the max time would be. This video clip can then be re-used for each "stopwatch" session you want.

Then you can import this clip into your video editing software, shrink it down to whatever size you want (premiere has a PiP plugin that can help you do this), place it in the corner and choose the opacity.

Then you can just insert the clip wherever you want the stopwatch to start counting, slide it around to get it precise. This is just my own personal preference, but I would have it fade in the corner right before it starts counting. When the dive is over, make the editing software hold that frame on the stopwatch for a few seconds and then have it fade away or disappear.

remember not to have the stopwatch sequence butted up against the edges of the screen as some of it may get "swallowed up" by overscan on an SDTV.

..and watch out for those stingrays!

[gadgetguy]

Probably the easiest way would be to use the ShowSMPTE() command in AviSynth. It's not technically a stopwatch because it shows frames in the last column instead of 100ths of a second, but it should give you the same feel. You can position it anywhere you want on the screen and it's just the numbers overlayed over your video.

[nvgs75guy]

better beleive it poor stevo!
feel sory for the guy
oh well at least he died happy

[gadgetguy]

Here's an AviSynth script that I think will kind of do what you want, but I'm sure there are probably other more elegant solutions. You would have to modify it for your source video, but essentially it starts by displaying the zeroed clock for a few seconds, then starts the timer and after a few seconds is removed from the screen, then just shortly before the dive is finished, (edit:use your imagination) the timer re-appears then stops and displays the total time until the end of the clip.

BlankClip(fps = 29.97, length=900, width = 720, height = 480, color=$000000, audio_rate = 48000, stereo = true)
a = Trim(0,99)
b = Trim(100,349)
c = trim(350,749)
d = Trim(750,849)
e = Trim(850,900)
a = subtitle(a,"00:00:00:00", x=77, y=368, font="Arial", size=30, align=7)
b = ShowSMPTE(b, x=150, y=400, offset="00:00:00:00", font="Arial", size=30)
d = ShowSMPTE(d, x=150, y=400, offset="00:00:23:10", font="Arial", size=30)
e = subtitle(e,"00:00:26:19", x=77, y=368, font="Arial", size=30, align=7)
return(a++b++c++d++e)

[daamon]

Check out this thread in another forum. There's a WMV clip towards the bottom that runs for a minute (if that's long enough).

The clip is 352 x 288 and runs at 25fps (i.e. PAL). Unfortunately, there's nothing there explaining how the clip was made - shame...

To use in Premiere, use WMM to convert the clip from WMV to AVI. Don't use DV as a codec as that's limited to 720 x 576, and so will upsize the WMV clip and make it look blurry - use uncompressed AVI instead.

Also, check out this filter for VirtualDub.