anyone know of a way to create a simple (?) timer effect in Action?
I want to have a counter running through the seconds and minutes that can be set by an axis, that counts seconds 0-60 before clicking the minute hand on one.
I tried following John Montgomerys FXPhd flm204 ep10 tutorial, but cannot get the expressions to work, and the 3d Text Counter preset only seems to count based on its current frame number.
Burnin Metadata?
not really - i don’t think there is metadata to use. i need to have an animatable clock counter to use over some timewarped action to show passage of time.
Remember doing this in AE years ago, kinda surprised there isn’t something bult in to Flame.
Make your own with color bars and timewarp it?
Do you want to comp it over footage then have it update with respect to the timewarp?
And are you trying to use digits or clock hands?
And are you ajusting the timewarp with timing or speed?
And are you looking for seconds and minutes or seconds and hours?
thanks chaps…
colour bars? don’t understand!
I do not want to timewarp the animation. I want to put something together than can be animated using Action, where you set the start and end frame , along with a start and end number, then action scrolls through the numbers in the given duration.
I’m only after seconds and minutes (numbers) - I already have the clock face animation.
I am avoiding putting the animation over timewarped footage - that has cost me hours of wasted time today, as doing so is causing the keyframes to jump -377 frames back in time everytime i try to render. I ended up using the timewarp to set the keyframes, then removing that footage from the shot so i could render out a finished clip that then gets comped back over the top.
thanks Sinan
I think there was a change in the software since this was first written that makes it not possible to use selection order, or something like that. What used to be simple now requires an entry for every character.
Clock.zip (152.2 KB)
This might help. V2022.1
Burn-in Metadata works great on a black frame. You can copy the position.x of the axis, and link a timeworp that follows the burn-in node that is feeding your action. Crop the frames off the end, and you’re good to go.
Works perfectly.
Thanks Tim….can’t wait to try it out!
edit - Brilliant solution Tim. Works a charm, and does exactly what i needed. I’ll have to break it down and see how you did this.
Thank you
Thank you Sam…now I understand what Randy was saying earlier!
Glad it worked out. I did it rather quickly between jobs yesterday morning, so in retrospect there are some things I might change to make it more user friendly so you could change the font in a single toggle, or more easily align the characters.
Thanks for this setup Tim, got me out of a fix today. 
Does anybody know how to add two decimals to the counter?
