Faster Avid Outputs with Timecode Burn-In

Exporting QuickTimes out of Avid can take a long time, especially if you have timecode burn-in across the picture. But if you offload the burn-ins and encoding to other apps you can get it done in a fraction of the time. And with most of the encoding taking place outside of Avid you can keep working while it crunches in the background. Here’s how.

1. Export your sequence as a QuickTime reference out of Avid

First, export your sequence without any burn-ins as a QuickTime reference. This will usually take less than 5 minutes if you don’t have a lot of effects that need to be rendered first. (And you should render before you export.)

2. Add burn-ins with Toki TC

Adding timecode burn-in with Avid causes you to have to render the entire sequence before exporting so we’re skipping that step and adding it after. You add the burn-in with an app called Toki TC. It’s available here and costs $15. There’s a free demo. 

Open the QuickTime reference in Toki TC. It will ask if you want to add a timecode track, click yes. This matches the timecode burn-in to the timecode track embedded in the QuickTime reference which matches your Avid sequence.

Toki TC gives you the option to add Time Code, Feet+Frames, Frame, and Text burn-ins. Click on the tabs and check or uncheck the ones you want. Then you can change the font, size, color, etc. and position them on the screen where you want them.

Once it’s all set click Save. This will process the timecode and save the burn-ins back to the QuickTime reference movie in just a few seconds. The reason this happens so quickly is because it’s being saved as a QuickTime text track and is not actually “baked” into the picture. That will happen next, in Compressor. 

*There is also another app that adds burn-ins similar to Toki TC called QT Sync. It will add timecode as a text track just the same, but I find the UI a little difficult and they’re aren’t as many options for formatting. But QT Sync is free and Toki TC is $15. I prefer Toki TC and think it’s definitely worth the cash.

3. Compress with Compressor - and enable QuickCluster!

Now you have a QuickTime reference with burn-ins and it just needs to be crunched to the desired format. Compressor works best for this (MPEG Streamclip does not work with text tracks). It’s really fast if you set it up with a QuickCluster so it takes advantage of all the cores in your processor. Here are instructions for setting that up.



Compressor will “bake” in the text track to the picture during the encoding. This usually takes about 15 minutes for a 45 minute video because the QuickCluster splits up the video and encodes multiple parts at a time.

In the end we have a 45 minute sequence, with burn-ins, output in less than 20 minutes, from start to finish. Hopefully you find this useful, please leave any comments or questions below.

*In this example I was working with a 45 min DNX36 sequence and crunching in Compressor to an .mp4 at 1,200 Kbps- single pass. I was using a Mac Pro dual 2.66 Quad-Core.