This User Actor can record your start time, current time, and runtime into a text file. If you put this in a background Scene at the beginning of your file, you can use it to automatically record the exact time your show starts, ends, and how long it lasted. This can also be useful for debugging if you’re leaving a file running long-term and finding that it experiences issues after a certain amount of time. This User Actor allows you to:

• Define a suffix to add to the filename
• Set the interval at which you want it to write the current time and runtime to the text file.
• Turn it on and off (which will start the timer over in a new file)
• See the filename, start time, last recorded time, and runtime on its outputs.

Please note that this User Actor should be put into a background Scene (video tutorial, written tutorial) that you leave active, as you need to enable the User Actor and then have it continue to be in an active Scene in order to keep updating the times in the text file. Every time you enable and disable this User Actor, or leave and re-enter the Scene it’s in, the User Actor will create a new text file with a new start time.

Changelog v3 – 2022-12-07

• Fixed some math inside the Time Converter User Actor that’s used internally.

Changelog v2 – 2022-12-06

Inputs

• Added a non-functional “—write interval—” input purely for labeling purposes. (It relates to the inputs below it.)
• Renamed the pre-existing write interval inputs from “write interval (mins)” and “write interval (secs)” to “mins” and “secs”
• Added write interval inputs for weeks, days, and hours (so now the write interval can be any combination of weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds).

Outputs

• Cleaned the text on the outputs so that a fresh version of the User Actor shows timecodes of “00:00:00” instead of the random values that were present when I ran my last test
• Added a “write” output in case anyone wants to trigger anything at the same time
• Connected the “Runtime” output to the series of actors that makes the runtime timecode. Previously it was connected to the associated output on the Data Array, so it would only update at whatever interval you set. With this change, the runtime output will update for you visually in real time instead of at the set intverval.

Misc

• Added Javascript-powered User Actor inside to handle time conversion from weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds to total seconds for the intervals.