Timecode Burn-in Details

SynthEyes 2204 now features frame number, timestamp, and timecode burn‐in to Camera and Perspective Views, and Save Sequence and Preview Movie output. This tutorial shows the controls and various details.

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Hi, this is Russ Andersson with another new-feature run-through for SynthEyes 2204. Today I'm going to point out a few details about burn-ins, like the frame number in the corner of this shot. SynthEyes can burn frame numbers, timecode, or timestamps into the Camera or Perspective Views while you're working in SynthEyes, or into your Save Sequence or Preview Movie output files. Burn-ins are helpful for quality control, whether its for your own internal checking, or for talking to external clients. The main burn-in controls are on the View menu. These settings control burn-ins throughout SynthEyes. You can find them in the right-click menus of the Camera and Perspective Views also. Those affect all windows too. The initial settings for new SynthEyes scenes are set by Preferences in the Image Input section. Let's take a look at the different modes. Right now, we're in the basic Frame Number mode. If you look at the details, you'll see the shot starting at frame zero, though the images start at frame 326. We do NOT have Match Frame Numbers turned on for this shot. We could simply bring up the Shot Settings and turn on Match Frames if we wanted. But, numbering from zero can be more convenient when the frame numbers are large. If we want to SEE the full frame number even with "Match Frames" off, we can switch to Force-Match Frame, a best-of-both approach. Now you see the image frame numbers. I'll quickly mention timestamps, which are available from some movie types. It's a time in seconds, usually from the beginning of the shot. If you ask for a timestamp, and there isn't one, SynthEyes will add it, and indicate that with the plus sign. Now, on to timecode. With timecode selected, you'll see it, if it is available. Otherwise, you'll get frame numbers. If the last colon is a semicolon, it is drop-frame coding, which seems very rarely used, even though it is nominally necessary. There's little point to showing timecode if we don't have timecode to show. At present, SynthEyes can read timecode from ProRes movies on Windows and Linux, or from movies with any codec on macOS. It can also read from ARRI, Blackmagic RAW, OpenEXR, and RED RAW files. There's a preference in the RED RAW section to control whether the Absolute or Edge timecode is used. As you start to render output, you'll work with the Save Sequence and Preview Movie panels. Both of them have a burn-in checkbox, to turn it off or on temporarily while the output images are rendering. Thanks for watching and please check out the other SynthEyes 2204 videos.