last updated November 3, 2009
ProDate DV is an FXPlug for Final Cut Pro that allows you to display the time and date recorded into the DV datastream by your DV camcorder. Most DV cameras record the date and time of the recording into DV data, but Final Cut Pro doesn't have a way to expose this to you. And while there are very useful third party logging and organizing apps that do access this date info, until now there hasn't been an easy way to get this information into a text effect in Final Cut Pro.
You apply ProDate DV like any other video filter:
Once you have ProDate DV applied you need to activate it, and once that's done you can proceed to configure and use the plug-in.
Before you can adjust the look and style of your onscreen time and date you need to first specify the media file and the clip's in point frame number. When the plug-in is first applied the output of the plug-in will display the message "Media File and Clip In Point must be specified."
Once you have set the plug-in's Source Media and Clip In Point fields ProDate DV will display the current frame's original date and time onscreen according to the plug-in's settings.
Please note: Due to a bug in Final Cut Pro our plug-in may display two different date/time outputs depending on whether you're looking at the Viewer or the Canvas. For this reason always look at the output in the Canvas, the date/time shown in the Viewer may be different and wrong.
To play your ProDate DV-applied clip in the timeline change your timeline RT settings to Unlimited RT. This will display an orange render bar over clips with ProDate DV applied in your timeline to indicate that you will get some level of real time performance. The RT settings menu is in the upper-left of the timeline window.
If you do not enable Unlimited RT then you'll have a red render bar and you won't be able to play any plug-in-applied clips in real time, and that's no fun at all.
As described in more detail below, this is one of the most important settings of ProDate DV. The plug-in needs to know where your media file is so that it can read the file to get the date and time data for the displayed frame.
Until you have selected the clip's media file (and the clip's in point, in the next section) ProDate DV will display a red outline on the frame with a message telling you which settings remain unset.
Click the Choose... button to navigate to your media file. We suggest before you click this button you first rlight-click on the clip in the timeline and choose Reveal in Finder. Then when you click Choose... you can drag the media file from the Finder window that Final Cut Pro opened for you into the file selection dialog.
Click here to watch a movie demonstrating how to set the media file and clip in point.
As described above this is the other of the most important settings of ProDate DV. After the plug-in knows which file to read it needs to know where in that file to look for the frame FCP is displaying. Once ProDate DV knows the frame number of the clip's in point it can perform its magic.
Until you have selected the clip's in point (and the clip's media file, above) ProDate DV will display a red outline on the frame with a message telling you which settings remain unset.
The clip in point needs to be displayed in frames, not timecode.
Here are tips to determine this number:
Click here to watch a movie demonstrating how to set the media file and clip in point.
ProDate DV displays up to two lines of text onscreen and you choose what appears on those two lines. The plug-in has date and time templates that you can edit and these templates appear in this menu.
See Line 1.
The Font menu allows you to choose in which font your date and time information appears.
The Size slider adjusts the font size.
This menu allows you to select the style of the text, the choices are Plain, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic.
Alignment controls whether the two lines have their left sides, right sides or centers lined up with the coordinates of the position control.
Chooses the color of the onscreen text.
Use this control to select the position of the text onscreen.
When enabled ProDate DV draws the date and time info and the source video image together on screen. If you turn this option off ProDate DV will display the date and time onto a transparent frame.
We like the idea of applying the effect to its own clip on a track above the background video and turning this option off, it gives you much more control. You can add a drop shadow using the Drop Shadow option in the Motion tab, you can apply animations to position or rotation or scale or other distortion effects that only affect the text.
This slider determines the mix of the effect's output and the original uneffected source image. When set to 100 the result will be 100% effected output, when set to 50 you will see a 50% mix of the effect's output and the original source. The results of anything other than 100 look poor for some reason, so if you're looking for a way to animate the text on and off, instead apply the effect to its own layer above the video background then apply opacity keyframes or whatever your creativity requires.
The date and time format choices you see in the plug-in interface are driven by an XML file that you can edit to modify the factory settings and add your own templates.
To edit your format settings, open the ADProDateSettings.xml file in a text editor (we like the awesome and free TextWrangler). This file is located in "/Library/Application Support/Automatic Duck/Supporting Files/". Note that the Library folder you're starting in is the Library folder at the root of your hard drive, not the Library folder in your Home directory.
Don't worry if you're XML-averse, creating your own templates is easy. Feel free to copy the existing templates then substitute the tokens as necessary.
The format of the XML-based template is:
<entry name="NameThatAppearsInPlug-in">
<format>Tokens</format>
</entry>
The individual parts of the time and date are represented by "tokens", a percent sign followed by one or two characters. Tokens are used to represent hour, day of week, numerical month, month spelled out in long form, month spelled out in short form, and so on. If you want text surrounding or in-between time or date elements, enter that text between the tokens. For example if you wanted a colon to appear between the hour and minutes in a time template, you might enter %Kl:%M because %Kl will return the hour as a number, then you have the colon, then %M returns the minutes.
After you make changes to your ADProDateSettings.xml file you will need to relaunch Final Cut Pro for your changes to take effect inside ProDate DV.
The tokens used to generate the date are from a Unix command called strftime, therefore there are perhaps more options you may really need, but with options comes flexibility and with flexibility you have fewer sore muscles.
| token | description | example output |
| %a | An abbreviated textual representation of the day | Sun through Sat |
| %A | A full textual representation of the day | Sunday through Saturday |
| %d | Two-digit day of the month (with leading zeros) | 01 to 31 |
| %e | Day of the month, with a space preceding single digits | 1 to 31 |
| %j | Day of the year, 3 digits with leading zeros | 001 to 366 |
| %u | ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week | 1 (for Monday) though 7 (for Sunday) |
| %w | Numeric representation of the day of the week | 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday) |
| token | description | example output |
| %U | Week number of the given year, starting with the the first Sunday as the first week | 13 (for the 13th full week of the year) |
| %V | ISO-8601:1988 week number of the given year, starting with the first week of the year with at least 4 weekdays, with Monday being the start of the week | 01 through 53 (where 53 accounts for an overlapping week) |
| %W | A numeric representation of the week of the year, starting with the first Monday as the first week | 46 (for the 46th week of the year beginning with a Monday) |
| token | description | example output |
| %b | Abbreviated month name, based on the locale | Jan through Dec |
| %B | Full month name, based on the locale | January through December |
| %h | Abbreviated month name, based on the locale (an alias of %b) | Jan through Dec |
| %m | Two digit representation of the month | 01 (for January) through 12 (for December) |
| token | description | example output |
| %C | Two digit representation of the century (year divided by 100, truncated to an integer) | 19 for the 20th Century |
| %g | Two digit representation of the year going by ISO-8601:1988 standards (see %V) | Example: 09 for the week of January 6, 2009 |
| %G | The full four-digit version of %g | Example: 2008 for the week of January 3, 2009 |
| %y | Two digit representation of the year | Example: 09 for 2009, 79 for 1979 |
| %Y | Four digit representation for the year | Example: 2038 |
| token | description | example output |
| %H | Two digit representation of the hour in 24-hour format | 00 through 23 |
| %I | Two digit representation of the hour in 12-hour format | 01 through 12 |
| %l (lower-case 'L') | Hour in 12-hour format, with a space preceeding single digits | 1 through 12 |
| %M | Two digit representation of the minute | 00 through 59 |
| %p | UPPER-CASE 'AM' or 'PM' based on the given time | Example: AM for 00:31, PM for 22:23 |
| %r | Same as "%I:%M:%S %p" | Example: 09:34:17 PM for 21:34:17 |
| %R | Same as "%H:%M" | Example: 00:35 for 12:35 AM, 16:44 for 4:44 PM |
| %S | Two digit representation of the second | 00 through 59 |
| %T | Same as "%H:%M:%S" | Example: 21:34:17 for 09:34:17 PM |
| %X | Preferred time representation based on locale, without the date | Example: 03:59:16 or 15:59:16 |
| %z | Either the time zone offset from UTC or the abbreviation (depends on operating system) | Example: -0500 or EST for Eastern Time |
| %Z | The time zone offset/abbreviation option NOT given by %z (depends on operating system) | Example: -0500 or EST for Eastern Time |
| token | description | example output |
| %c | Preferred date and time stamp based on locale | Example: Tue Feb 5 00:45:10 2009 for February 4, 2009 at 12:45:10 AM |
| %D | Same as "%m/%d/%y" | Example: 02/05/09 for February 5, 2009 |
| %F | Same as "%Y-%m-%d" (commonly used in database datestamps) | Example: 2009-02-05 for February 5, 2009 |
| %s | Unix Epoch Time timestamp (same as the time() function) | Example: 305815200 for September 10, 1979 08:40:00 AM |
| %x | Preferred date representation based on locale, without the time | Example: 02/05/09 for February 5, 2009 |
%Ke same as %e but the added space is removed
%Kl same as %l but the added space is removed
%Kp same as %p but AM or PM returned in lower case
Remember that after you're done editing your ADProDateSettings.xml file you will need to relaunch Final Cut Pro for your changes to appear in ProDate DV.
Before ProDate DV can do anything you must point the plug-in to the media file your clip uses, you do this by pressing the Choose... button. Final Cut Pro doesn't provide FXPlug plug-ins with information about media files, so you need to connect the plug-in with the clip's media file. If you follow these steps it should be quick and easy (it takes longer to explain than to do, watch this movie to see how quick this goes)...
But why?
Unfortunately there are limitations in FXPlug that don't allow a plug-in like ProDate DV to access the media file referenced by a clip in the timeline. In order for ProDate DV to do its magic it needs to read the source media file in order to read the datecode. Of course the plug-in also needs to know which frame to go after in the media file, and that brings up the next question...
In addition to the limitations outlined above, the FXPlug API does not give our plug-in the frame number of the source frame, which is the second key detail ProDate DV needs in order to read the datecode embedded in a frame of DV video.
ProDate DV needs to know on which source frame your clip starts, and unfortunately Final Cut Pro can't provide this information so we need you to do this. But don't worry, it is easy. Explaining takes longer than doing...
NOTE: If you slip your shot or trim the head frame or otherwise edit the ProDate DV-applied clip such that the in-point changes ProDate DV will no longer be accurate until you re-set the in point to its new value.
If you would like ProDate DV to have the ability to automagically get the source media file and source frame number from the FxPlug API, please consider telling Apple just that from their Final Cut Pro feedback page.
Yes, the output of ProDate DV should match your system's Formats->Region setting.
Open System Preferences and from the Personal section at the top choose International (OS X 10.4 and 10.5) or Language & Text (OS X 10.6). Then choose the Formats tab then select your language and region from the Region popup menu. You may need to enable the Show all regions checkbox if your desired choice is not available in the list.
We looked at the QuickTime movies Final Cut Pro created after capturing HDV and it appeared that the datecode information wasn't there, so there's nothing to read. However there is a workaround if your camera or deck can downconvert to DV. You can assemble the clips you need to determine the date for into a new sequence then use FCP's Media Manager to create a new offline sequence. Then batch capture these clips as DV using your deck or camera to downconvert the HDV recording to DV. Now you can use ProDate DV to get the time/date from the DV versions of the clips then you can superimpose the date over your HDV clips.
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