I do recall seeing a tutorial from The Sharper Turtle PD Tutorials where he shows you how to construct a custom counter. The updated tutorial show how to use the fx time stamp. He may have taken down the old tutorial so you may want to contact JimIowa.

Check out this tutorial. Instead of creating a 60 minute timer you can make say a 90 or 120 minute one along with the seconds. Link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNhKElfuEro . This may help.

FYI In the comments section of the above tutorial, Jim has linked to a newer video that he says is less cumbersome.

NewBlueFX has a time effect (in Essentials Pack IV) that is more customizable than PD's and does have mm:ss, but the minutes still rollover at 60.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Hi Mike -

That "rollover at 60" is the thing that makes your game timer more challenging.

Yonks ago, before there was a time stamp effect in PDR, PDtoots had requests for ways to create on-screen timers. At the time, the best thing I could come up with was using titles as Jim (Sharper Turtle) showed in his tutorials. Attached is the "how to" doc I made back then. We distributed these as produced videos but the longest one was 20 minutes, which is useless if you have a game that goes for 75!

The simplest things to do - like using the Time Stamp or NewBlue timer FX - even doing a screen recording of an on-screen stopwatch - ALL have that "rollover at 60" limitation.

So - if you want your timer to go... 59:58 - 59:59 - 60:00 - 60:01 - 60:02 etc (to avoid the rollover) you have to make it manually or find a windows stopwatch that can be customised so it counts only minutes & seconds without jumping from 59:59 to 01:00:00

The (sort of) good news is that once you've bored yourself witless copying & pasting titles, you can use it over and over (using the produced file).

Take a look at this packed project - it's only titles - & you'll see how "easy" it is to manufacture once you have the formatting sorted out.

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

Quote or find a windows stopwatch that can be customised so it counts only minutes & seconds without jumping from 59:59 to 01:00:00

Tony, that's a brilliant idea! Not to downplay all the work you've done, but take a look at what I found in the Windows store. They offer a 24 hour trial and then it's only US$0.99 to buy:



The timer can be stopped.started/reset/set to any value, and you could make a screen recording of it and then crop it to just show the timer (or the period and scores too) and stick it in the corner of your game vid as an overlay.

I would really like to use this in my daughter's lacrosse games, but starting today I'm actually bringing a 3rd cam just for the scoreboard because it's otherwise completely impossible to keep track of when the clock starts and stops during the game (at least for me and the other parents).

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Useful little app, optodata... if you're on a Surface, tablet etc with a touch screen. Scratching around, I've found dozens of apps like that, but they all have one shortcoming or the other. It leads one to think there must be a Count Up Timer/Stopwatch app that will do the job without the rollover.

Anyway, Mike, doing a screen recording of the timer is a definite possibility.

In the meantime, here's an example of how that Title Timer project might look in situ... the video is FIFA gameplay. Scoreboard in top left corner is just a black box with a hole it in & a few graphics plonked on top.



I'll keep digging opto!

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

I installed and tested that app on my desktop rig (no touch interface).

Clicking on the timer started and paused it, and I was able to access the hidden controls along the bottom edge with my mouse cursor. The only thing I couldn't open was the options (gear icon).

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

OK - I was wrong about the Stadium Score app... took a bit of fiddling before I found that right-clicking led me to the reset/settings. I couldn't get to the options either.

Thinking I had it under control, I set up a screen capture of the count-up timer. All good, I thought, and went off to do other things while it worked its way up to 99 minutes. HA! When I came back a while later, I found this on the screen:

because I'd set it to "Soccer" (45 minute halves). DOH!

optodata - what setting di you use to get it to roll past 60 minutes? Some of them are countdowns (i.e. time left) & I can't modify them.

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

Hi Tony,

Thanks to you (and everyone) for their advice.

I decided that doing a screen recording of a timer is the only way forward accepting that Cyberlink won't produce an mm:ss stopwatch that doesn't roll over to 1 hour any time soon.

After a lot of searching online, I did however find a fully configurable count up timer that does roll over to 60, 61, 62 minutes etc, ideal for my soccer highlights videos, here, which I think will work well.

Thanks again,

Mike

Quote After a lot of searching online, I did however find a fully configurable count up timer that does roll over to 60, 61, 62 minutes etc, ideal for my soccer highlights videos, here, which I think will work well.

Mike, that looks like a nice, easy to use website, and I imagine other people looking for a similar timer may well use that in their videos. Thanks for sharing it!

Tony, I had also set the app to Soccer and I manually entered 59:50 and then started Screen Recorder. Unfortunately, my 24 hour trial has now expired and I can't revisit the settings (on my desktop or other devices) to refresh my memory without purchasing the app

Quote Hi Mike -

That "rollover at 60" is the thing that makes your game timer more challenging.

Yonks ago, before there was a time stamp effect in PDR, PDtoots had requests for ways to create on-screen timers. At the time, the best thing I could come up with was using titles as Jim (Sharper Turtle) showed in his tutorials. Attached is the "how to" doc I made back then. We distributed these as produced videos but the longest one was 20 minutes, which is useless if you have a game that goes for 75!

The simplest things to do - like using the Time Stamp or NewBlue timer FX - even doing a screen recording of an on-screen stopwatch - ALL have that "rollover at 60" limitation.

So - if you want your timer to go... 59:58 - 59:59 - 60:00 - 60:01 - 60:02 etc (to avoid the rollover) you have to make it manually or find a windows stopwatch that can be customised so it counts only minutes & seconds without jumping from 59:59 to 01:00:00

The (sort of) good news is that once you've bored yourself witless copying & pasting titles, you can use it over and over (using the produced file).

Take a look at this packed project - it's only titles - & you'll see how "easy" it is to manufacture once you have the formatting sorted out.

Cheers - Tony

I agree with the "bored yourself witness" with the copy and paste of developing one of these countdown titles from scratch. If you need one really badly you can design something impressive, but the cost in time is huge. There sure is a market for more third-party products that could be designed with the flexibility you're looking for. --Jim

Jim - I can agree with it too, on the basis of personal & immediate experience.

I know the OP has resolved the original question, but thought I'd post these here in case anyone else ever has a need for the same sort of thing.

After some hours of "boring myself witless" I fabricated two count up timers to be used as video overlays. I say "fabricated" because one of the initial propositions was to do a screen recording of a count-up timer... that idea ran into a bit of a snag. After producing the cropped & tidied up screen capture, the duration was short by an unnacceptable amount. I jumped through all sorts of hoops trying to test the accuracy of the original timers & find what was going wrong in production. As far as I could tell, the produced video was "losing" about a frame each minute... & because the project was ~100 minutes in duration, the produced file was ~100 frames short (i.e. not much good for a "timer"). The maths part of my brain wasn't up to the task hence the need for "fabrication".

Anyway, I made two Count-up timer videos. One's done totally with titles on a green screen background, so it can be chroma-keyed. The other was manufactured from a screen cap of the Stadium Score app found by optodata. Shan't bore you with the details. (I still haven't managed to get that thing to go past 45 minutes without jumping columns)

You can download the two (720p) videos here:

Green Screen Titles
Stadium Score Screen Cap

Here's what they (might) look like in situ:

Green Screen Titles...


Stadium Score Screen Cap...


Download links are in the video description too.

And yes - a bit of extra flexibility built into the Time Stamp effect would be very welcome

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

They look good Tony. I beleive Jim also showed how to create a timer. After creating a few he use copy/ paste and continue until he finished. He must have taken it down.

There is some frames mismatch between 29.97 and 30 Fps.

Quote They look good Tony. I beleive Jim also showed how to create a timer. After creating a few he use copy/ paste and continue until he finished. He must have taken it down.

There is some frames mismatch between 29.97 and 30 Fps.

Here is my last attempt at making this as painless and portable as possible. May not be stopwatch precise, but it's usefu. It's still on YouTube.
--Jim