Blackmagic Forum

Most people hate tracking their time when they are in the zone working on a creative project. It would be an interesting feature if Resolve could show you statistics on how long you've been actively working on a project, so that it would make billing easier after the project is done.

It would be even better if it could give you granular breakdowns of the amount of time spent on specific shots, time spent rendering, transferring data, Editing/Conforming vs. Color grading, creating optimized media, etc. Then you could print out a PDF, text file or spreadsheet of that data, so you can use it as a unified "log" of all the time you spent on a project.

This would be similar to the "Screen Time" feature in iOS, which gives you a overview of how long you've used certain apps.

Since Resolve uses a Postgres database backend, I'd think such a feature would be much more doable than it would in non-database driven apps like Premiere?

Kinda of a crazy feature request, I know, but it might also be potentially game changing, as far as creative apps go.

Mel Matsuoka wrote:Kinda of a crazy feature request

Not that crazy. Apple Color did much of this (including per-shot time breakdown I believe), and I would welcome it in Resolve. I'd also like an average of the time spent grading each shot in a timeline. Though I wouldn't say it was in the top half of my personal list of priorities for Resolve.

Totally agree, it's a really needed feature !
I always make an estimated quote base on my experience.
But of course it's only a guess and for some project I work more hours than final invoiced.
Mainly because I don't know before I start a project that it will be longer, so when I decided to time track it's already too late.
Have this feature in DaVinci Resolve would be awesome

+1 Fully Agree with this feature, I already asked for it one year ago.

Instead, we got a Cut Page that nobody asked for, and many of us will never use.

I hope this feature is implemented on DVR17.
It's useful both for solo editors plannings, as for editing farms organization.

Stats will help us to plan and optimize our work better, and to know which taks are more profitable when is delegated to one or another collaborator. Also it helps to know our real fees per hour on each project.

Oh no, i would hate this!!

Given the stop/starts that occur as I work and take breaks, I's rather see folks with a timer on the desk than see BMD spend resources on this.

More so that every one of us has a phone with a timer built in.

Jim Simon wrote:Given the stop/starts that occur as I work and take breaks, I's rather see folks with a timer on the desk than see BMD spend resources on this.

More so that every one of us has a phone with a timer built in.

Breaks are part of a working day, so why would they not be included in time spent on a project? And this feature would make everything automatic, like it was in Apple Color.

Rick van den Berg wrote:Oh no, i would hate this!!

Well you wouldn't have to use it. But many others would find it useful.

+1

Tom Early wrote:Breaks are part of a working day, so why would they not be included in time spent on a project?

As a one man shop, if I stop work for a couple hours to have lunch and go for a walk or bike ride, I'm not going to charge that to the client.

That's why I think external timers are the best option here, leaving BMD free to spend resources elsewhere.

Jim Simon wrote:As a one man shop, if I stop work for a couple hours to have lunch and go for a walk or bike ride, I'm not going to charge that to the client.

That's why I think external timers are the best option here, leaving BMD free to spend resources elsewhere.

That a valid method as well. Both methods are valid. Resolve could also detect idle time easily enough, but there's no reason people would need to use this over another method they like better.

+1 Would be very useful for me and others.

As a workaround, Rescuetime will currently do much of this (though it is a relatively expensive subscription service).

A nice place to show the time spent on each given timeline and each given clip it would be on the "Media Pool" list, together with the fields "Duration", "Resolution", "Time Modified" etc.

On this way we can see that info individually for each timeline. But also it should be nice a breakdown for each timeline for time spent on the Edit Page, Color Page, Fairlight Page...

Tom Early wrote:Breaks are part of a working day, so why would they not be included in time spent on a project? And this feature would make everything automatic, like it was in Apple Color.

I believe MS Word (as one example) will tell you how long you spent actually working on an open file -- not how long the file sat open on your computer. It only counts the time when the keyboard was doing something with Word open.

I would bet the same thing could be done for Resolve. My guess is that they have a lot of other priorities to take care of first.

Did this ever happen?

As someone who works 3 different editing gigs - its really tough for me to track time spent on each project. I would love this for final settlement and also it would be amazing just to be able to keep stats to track improvement or productivity for other editors at my bay.

If this feature existed in Resolve and Fusion Studio, and had script hooks, I'd use the heck out of it in our pipeline for metrics and bidding assistance. I'd love to be able to get granular task data out of these programs...

Yes, this feature is a must !
Especially now, when the demand for video is higher than ever.
I tried using external timers, but everytime you have to think to stop and to relaunch it manually, then add & substract...
Plus keep a journal with the addition of all the time mesured such way - it's a waste of time!
And in the end it gives no useful detailed information.
Also, working with multiple orders during same month/time period, makes you switch between projects - and you easily forget to restart the timer.
So, for the Professional use (which is main Davinci target, right?), this feature is a must.

Yes I would love a time tracker per project with a simple setting like: "Pause if no changes after X minutes".

I always work on several projects in parallel and it would be a great help for charging clients !

We can already view only "Modified Clips last 1/2/3/6/24 hours" Which is a pretty similar feature I guess...
(I use it to check my clips per hour grading speed )

So why not guys ? Thanks !

+1....Would be a very nice option to use!!!

Vere very good feature it would be. +1

Don't know why this haven't been implemented yet

+1

And to echo everybody else: an absolute +1 for me. We currently just take notes and also export DRP's every day, so I can kind of guestimate, "well, I exported the session 4 times, so that means I worked on it for 4 days, so we charge X." But it's a guess, since I don't always have a precise number of hours.

+1
This would be a very innovative feature - Premiere doesn’t do this, right?
Both useful and unique.
Other things way higher in priority for me but I’d be psyched if this happens to appear.


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Actually a quite useful feature request if you think about it. +1 from me, but not a priority tbh.

Making resolve compatible with tools like ftrack for example would be much more useful. And those have time tracking functionality built in already.

Absolutely, what I was asking for =)

Jim Simon wrote:

Tom Early wrote:Breaks are part of a working day, so why would they not be included in time spent on a project?

As a one man shop, if I stop work for a couple hours to have lunch and go for a walk or bike ride, I'm not going to charge that to the client.

That's why I think external timers are the best option here, leaving BMD free to spend resources elsewhere.

I am a one-man-show too.. And that is the problem - I have to do plenty of things contemporary, so I lose an overview how much (effective) time I spent on every project

Just to revive this a little - it would be great to have an ftrack connect plugin for Resolve. It would allow a similar level of media publishing as the Frame.io connections does now, but with the added benefit of asset publishing and importing plus hooks for tracking time spent on various tasks.

https://www.ftrack.com/en/portfolio/connect

Not an urgent feature, but absolutely desirable. As others said, knowing exact and detailed time statistics would help immensely with professional work and productivity, and could be exclusive Resolve selling point for awhile.

Solid +1 from me

I'd love it!

Would use, I need to regularly report my working hours and sometimes I forget at what time I started working.

I used to use https://www.rescuetime.com/ which will at least track the amount of time an app is open.

Not everything some are asking for, but fairly useful.

For now I'm using "Apps Tracker".

Not bad at all with some useful settings.

For example it can pause time tracking independently for each open app after a given time span without activity. (see second post below)

Mac + PC / free.

App store : https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/apps-trac ... l=fr&mt=12

Developper's website : https://markodevcic.com/projects/

Cheers.

bump

Gedaly Guberek wrote:I used to use https://www.rescuetime.com/ which will at least track the amount of time an app is open.

Not everything some are asking for, but fairly useful.

The problem with this app, and what seems like every other one, is that there's some subscription tied to it. Like really? A monthly fee for something so small?

DaVinci just needs to include one of it's own in the program to end the nonsense. Why they haven't when people have been asking for it for years is beyond me.

AJKinOHIO wrote:

Gedaly Guberek wrote:DaVinci just needs to include one of it's own in the program to end the nonsense. Why they haven't when people have been asking for it for years is beyond me.

As much as I'd like to see this feature—as the originator of this thread—there are a lot more things that BMD should rightly be spending more of its time on than something like this. I just threw it out there for discussion, since similar functionality exists for other apps like Premiere…albeit as third-party solutions that require a capable API for the host application. I'm not sure if Resolve's API is robust enough for a third party developer to make something similar. But nobody should be surprised or upset that BMD hasn't added this feature, in any case.

Agreed.
Sure would be nice to have a really robust scripting API that would allow building things like this though. Preferably one that allowed making things that felt like they were built in to Resolve.

In the long run this could make Resolve both simpler and more maintainable inside in that much of what’s there now could be written in it. Programs like EMACS and Reaper have made spectacular use of such, whittling the “low-level” down to micro-kernel size.

This is also essentially how CPUs are made. A small core plus “microprogramming” that’s easier to write and much more reliable.

Still not there in DR 19?

+1 - and also for extended scripting API +1