 In this video, I'll be showing you how to use Stream Deck to add timestamps to your live recordings. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. Now, if you are a regular viewer of my videos, you may notice that sometimes I have timestamps in them and sometimes I don't. Well, hopefully going forward, that should all be fixed and they'll all have nice, neat timestamps. But what am I actually talking about with timestamps? Well, in YouTube videos, you have the ability to add stamps to the timeline to basically show where different sections are. So if I scrub along here, you can see that there's this little sort of break in the line here and it's got a little title. And as I scroll through, this is one section, in this case, Ecum Live Profiles. And then as I go to the next section, it says Ecum Live Interview Mode. And so there's different sections in the video basically. And so this means that as the viewer, you can basically scrub through and you can see where the end of one section is and the next one is starting. It also helps with Google search because you may have searched for something before on Google and then it's thrown up a video and in fact highlighted an exact section of the video that is relevant. Well, that is where there have been timestamps added into it. Now, YouTube is actually getting good at sort of figuring out these things itself, but certainly having the timestamps in there helps. And so it does all help with search. Well, how do you actually add those in as the YouTube creator? Well, if I come back over to YouTube Studio, you can see here that this is that same video that I just showed you. This is the description. And then down here, I've also got the timestamps which are in this format basically. So it's just a case of having the time in minutes and seconds or hours, minutes and seconds whichever depending on the length of your video and then having those separated with a colon and then a space and then the title that you want to give that section. So it starts with 00 and then call that the introduction or whatever and then as I say, just go through and add these wherever they are. So the issue that I have with this is I record all of my videos live to tape in one take. Not necessarily the first take. Sometimes I fluff the beginning a little bit. But so I have to do that. So to actually add in those timestamps, I have to go back and re-watch my video which is something that I never really enjoyed doing in any case. I do do it at double speed though just to make the pain end sooner. But still, nevertheless, I have actually got to go through and watch it. And actually by the time I've sort of paused to make a note of the time right down there, whatever the title needs to be, then usually it's probably about the length of the video in any case. So for a half hour video, it's pretty much adding in another half hour onto my workflow. And yeah, there's just always a little bit of friction there to go back and watch my things again. So I wanted to have a way that I could sort of speed this up in short of getting someone else to do it for me, which has happened in the past. Thank you very much. You know who you are. There must have been an easier way. And I stumbled across this when I was looking at some other stuff to do with Stream Deck and looking at some of the other plugins and noticed they'd got a plugin that was actually called Time Stamp. So let's go and have a look at how to get this. And I'll show you how it works. So first of all, the plugins are all available from the Stream Deck store. Everything in there is free at the moment. I'm sure that will change in time, but for the moment, everything in there is free. So what you do is just, let me put it a bit quick there, click on the little icon just to put the top of Stream Deck. It will open up the Stream Deck store and then come down to the left-hand side and click on plugins. And then you just want to search for Time Stamp and you'll see the plugin just there and click on the big blue install button. I've already done it. It's not blue anymore. But once you do that, it will appear in the plugins section over on the right-hand side. And I've created a little folder just so that we can play around with this. So here we can see Time Stamp at the bottom and there's basically two actions there. There is one which is New Log. That is where we're gonna start our new file because it's basically gonna generate a text file for us. And then the next one is where we're gonna actually add the marker points into that text file. So the first one here, as I say, is the New Log. So this is where we're gonna create the new file. So we want to give it a title. I'm just gonna be very original and call it Time Stamp. And then the file name. I'm gonna call this one Time Stamp but I do want to add a unique identifier to it. And the way that I do that in file naming is I always just give it a complete Time Stamp with year, month, day and so on and then the time down to the seconds. Fortunately, you can automate that or make that easier in here because there are some amendments you can add or additions rather that you can append to the file name. So if I click on this button over on the right hand side, down here I can add the day, the month, the year. So I'm gonna start with the year. Then I'm gonna add the month. Then I'm gonna add the day. And then I'm going to add the hours and the minutes and the seconds like that. So now that is basically a unique file name because we won't be starting two within the same second. So now I've got a unique file name and doing it in reverse order like that starting with the year, going back to the seconds. It means that when you sort your files in your Finder alphabetically, then they will be in sort of chronological order. So that is that. And then the next one we want to do is save to a specific location. So we can choose the folder and I'm gonna have these saving to basically my Ecamm live recording folder. So I'm gonna click on that one. And then what we can do is we can start looking at adding in the timestamps themselves. So that is using this little marker function. So here you've basically got two different options. You can either have, in fact, let me just give this one a name for the action. Or time marker, let's call it a marker, shall we? And you've got a few different options. So the text that you want to add in, you can add in either the elapsed time or the system time, or you can create something of your own. So I'm just gonna show you how this looks if you use each of these. So in fact, let's call this one system because this will be the one the way we're using the system time. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna copy this one and paste it. And then the text, you can use whatever text you want. So coming back here a minute, it's just taking a moment to load up. That's funny. There we go. So I'm just gonna put sample text like that. And you can see the date format. You can choose the date format that you want from there. These aren't the ones that I would recommend using. We'll create our own custom one in a moment, but I just wanna show you what the different formats look like. So this one, instead of using the system time, we're gonna use the elapsed time. And I'm gonna put sample text like that. But then what we're gonna do is, and this is the one that I would recommend doing, is if we come in here and then I'm just gonna call this one YouTube, because it is the way that we want the text to be for YouTube. And here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take out that sample text and then I'm just gonna add in the timestamp. And what we want to do is we want to add in the time since the log was created because we're obviously starting from the beginning of our video. So we want to just track it as it goes through. So here what I'm gonna do is click on this one, our since log created. Again, that little box at the right-hand side. Then I'm gonna add a colon. Then I'm gonna click minute since log created, then another colon. And then we'll do seconds since log created. So now what's gonna happen is if I come and press this button here, so I'm actually gonna start, you'll see it's gone green to signify that the log has started. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on the system time twice just to log two different system times. Then I'm gonna click on this elapsed time button. So I'm gonna click on that one two times. And then I'm gonna click on this one, which is our sort of YouTube formatted timestamp. So when I click on that one twice, we'll get to of those timestamps. And this will all make sense in a moment, by the way. And now I'm just gonna come back over to here and I'm just gonna press the button again to end the log. So there you go, it's changed to the blue color. Obviously you can update these icons and give them something more meaningful to yourself. And so now I'm gonna go into my folder with my, where the timestamp has been stored. And if I open this text file up, you'll see that it has basically recorded this. So make that text a little bit bigger. So if you remember the first one, I used the system timestamp and you can see it says timestamp and it's given us our system time. And then it's put the text in that we had added. The next one I did was the elapsed time. And that actually says elapsed time. It's given us the elapsed time. And then it's got the text and given us the text that we had put in there as well. And the final one, which is the one that I think is the one that we're gonna be interested in, is this one. Sorry, that was just off the screen there. Is this one, which is basically just the time with the hour, colon, minute, colon, second. So that is basically giving us our list of timestamps. So the way that I'm gonna use this is I'm literally just gonna have one button, which is this YouTube one. I'm gonna get rid of those right now. I'm only gonna use this one. So this one is gonna start my timestamp log and this one is gonna record my times. And so then what I'll end up with is just a single file which won't have any of this in it. And it'll literally just have a list of timestamps. I'm then gonna go through my video and just make sure if I haven't remembered that exactly what was in there. So I'll just need to go in here and basically add in my title. So whatever the section title was, I'll just be able to go through and add those all in. If you were doing something a little bit more structured, then what you can also do is you could actually go and create buttons for each of the sections. And so do this like as part of the preparation for the live stream or whatever, then you could actually just duplicate this button like this. And if you knew in advance the sections that you were going to be covering, then you might find it easier to actually go into here and then give this button a name. So this one could be space. Let's say this is section one. And then we'll come to this one and let's say that that is section two. Obviously this might be more relevant to whatever you're talking about rather than just giving it section one, two and three. This one might be product one, let's say, or product two. I hope you understand where I'm going with this. So there we go, we've got product one. So you can imagine if I just delete all these to save confusing it. You could actually just prepare for your whole show by knowing exactly what these different sections were. And then if I was to start another timestamp log, so I'm gonna press that button again. And now let's say we've done our little introduction and we've come to the point where we're talking about in section one, so I'll press that button. Then I'll come on and talk a little bit more and then we go on to section two and then maybe we're gonna introduce our product three or product one at whatever it is at the end. So I'll do that and then we'll have another bit of a space and then I'll end the recording. So now I've ended that. So let's have a look now at what that particular file looks like. So now with this file you can see that actually this has created the timestamps already to literally just copy and paste into YouTube with the actual section heading. So when I'm doing something that is a little bit more thought out in terms of the exact sections, which really should be every video, but I'll be honest, it isn't. Then I would go through and actually just add in those things in advance so that as I go through the sections I can just press the button to add those timestamps and have all the titles. If I was gonna have this with let's say different scenes that were relevant to each of the intros to each of those different sections for example, then you could easily create these actions here as part of a multi-action. So for example, my starting the log, the way that I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna come over to here. This is my regular ECAM setup on Stream Deck. I did do a video all about this by the way. I have two pages of buttons for my ECAM Live. So I'll leave a link to that video up in the top corner. Pointed to the wrong corner, I'm in that corner. In fact, just above my head. But what I'm gonna do with this one is I'm actually for my, when I start recording, I've got this record button. But when I click on that one, it's actually a multi-action because what it does is it plays my intro music that I have at the beginning of all my videos. It starts recording and then here you can see I've now added that in as the timestamp as well. So it actually starts that log when I start my video and that way I know that it's gonna start at 00. It's gonna be at the right time for when I start my, the actual recording as well. So everything is going to match up nicely. So that is how I am using timestamp to hopefully make my videos a little better for search going forward and also make it a little bit more user-friendly for all of you lovely people who are watching. 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