The Best Way to Create Timers in DaVinci Resolve!

Today I want to show you the best way to build timers and countdown effects inside of Da Vinci Resolve. First using the built-in Freeway inside of Dav Vinci Resolve Fusion and then using a pack I created which makes animated timers with slide animations incredibly easy to do. You don't want to miss that tool and I'm going to talk more about it when we get there. But first, let's start in the edit page and take a look at the way that we normally set up a timer inside of Da Vinci Resolve. In the effects tab, we come down to the text plus node and drag this down. And in order to actually make the timer effect, we have to use the fusion page to to at least some extent. So, we come over into the inspector, right click on the text box, and come down to time code. When we do time code, you can see it has the frame count as well as the seconds and eventually minutes and hours. If we want to edit this beyond just changing the size and font, we have to go to the Fusion page. And then when we click on the text node, we can go to the modifiers tab and we have these time code settings. There's not much to customize, but a little bit to change the layout and timing. What we might want to do right away is turn off the hours and frames, so that way we just have a minutes and seconds timer. Then, the next control allows us to add to the timer. So, if I come in here and type in 30, that's going to add 30 frames, which is basically just going to offset it by a second in a 30 FPS timeline. Now, the annoying thing about this is you can't do a countdown built right in. And you always need to make sure that the FPS matches your project. So, you can't really make a template that works across many projects without starting to use expressions and stuff like that. If you wanted to make this into something like a countdown animation, what you need to do is go to the edit page. We can make this as long as we want. Say we make this, you know, almost 2 minutes. Then you need to right click, set this to be a compound clip, and we can just do this timer title. And now on this clip, we need to right click, come up to change clip speed, and then just do reverse speed. And we press change. And this will have it start at the ending value and then count down until it eventually reaches zero. But again, the annoying thing about this is it's hard to keep it on a value of zero. You'd have to do a freeze frame and extend that out. And then if I wanted to go back and make it so that this starts at 2 minutes, I can't just drag this clip out. I'd have to rightclick, open in timeline, change the length of the original clip, come back to this timeline, and then change the length of this compound clip. As you can see, the built-in timer system in Dual Resolve is a bit limited.