How to apply burnt-in timecode to a Premiere Pro sequence. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this video we're going to look at using burnt-in timecode (BITC). Now just to be clear, I'm talking about the 8-digit time reference for hours, minutes, seconds and frames, which is superimposed or 'burnt' into the video. Now, why would you want the timecode burnt into the screen? Well, there are two reasons why I use BITC. Firstly, you might want to use it where your video isn't ready for release yet. So, if you're sending rough cuts with BITC it just makes it very clear that the video isn't ready for publishing. My second reason for using BITC is for reference on rough cuts where your client isn't sat next to you during editing. You might be thinking that most media players have a run-time display, why not use that? Well, you could but I'll give you two quick reasons why you shouldn't. Firstly, it's highly unlikely that the person watching your video has a media player that displays proper timecode that includes frames, and seeing as video is made of frames, we need to see them, especially if it's a fast paced edit. Secondly, the media player might not have run-time displayed by default, or it might start in full-screen mode, especially if it's a native Windows 8 app. Now let's look at how it's done. It's very simple, but it is something I've been asked many times. I've got this project ready in Premiere Pro CC and I've got some nice stock footage from Pond5.com. You can use the Timecode on a per clip basis, but here I'm just looking at getting the timecode from the sequence across the whole video. So I'm going to start off by dragging a box around these three clips, and I'm going to hit the 'full stop' key or the period key if you're American. As you can see we've got his clip here of a business man looking for his hotel, some wheat and a clock. So the first thing I'm going to do is right-click in the bin and choose 'new item', then 'transparent video'. The default settings are going to do, so we click OK. Then we drag the transparent video to the top layer in our sequence so that the timecode sits on top of everything else. Drag it out to the duration of the sequence and as you would expect there's no change there because it's transparent video. We want to get the timecode onto this transparent video. So head over to Effects, Video effects, Video, and there's the Timecode. So we drag that over to the transparent video; and you can see it appears over here. So now we want to go over to the Effect Controls. Now, here's the Timecode Settings. You can see we've got this little indicator here and that's for fields and seeing as our timeline is progressive, we don't need that so I'm going to turn off the Field Symbol. And the next thing, you see that there's a semi-transparent box around the timecode, now that looks OK on that clip, but if you go over to something that's got a white background, it's not quite as visible, so I'm going to change the opacity on that from 40% to 60%, just to make it a little bit clearer. Now the next thing I want to change, I want to make it a bit smaller because it's a bit obtrusive stuck right in the middle there. So the default is 15%, I'm going to change that to 8. So there we go, that's much more like it. Now I want to move it over into the corner so it's even less obtrusive, so I'm going to use the slider to get that over to there, and move it down a little bit; and that is fine. If we go to the beginning of the timeline, you'll see that our timecode is all zeroes there as it should be, but up here it says one hour; let's see what's going on there. If you come to the effect controls, you'll see that there's a setting called Timecode Source, at the moment that's set to Media, we need to put that on Regenerate, and you'll see that, that now matches the timecode over here. That is what we want. That represents the timecode in our sequence, we're now ready to export and send our draft edit off to the client.

• published: 19 May 2014
• views: 15297