Time Stamp from 3D Studio Max

[Dysfunctional]

Hi guys,

I've run into a problem where we're making previews of our animations from 3D Studio to show to management and I require a Time Stamp overlay for clarity and accuracy purposes.

I have found a CounterText Plugin which displays the Time as Text in the scene. This approach requires resizing and linking the CounterText and a semi-transparent background to the camera. This works alright but is not ideal since I have roughly 100 scenes that will need to be previewed.

Is there a way to quickly overlay a Time Stamp straight from Max similar to After Effects/Premiere? Bare in mind that I'm not actually rendering the animation only creating a preview.

How do you guys deal with this issue?

[Buzzy]

If I understand correctly, you're looking for something like an SMPTE timecode, right?
You can turn on frame numbers in the Make Preview dialog box, thats about the best I can think of... but its not a timecode, its frame numbers. With a dash of scripted controller wizardry, I could probably turn a slider manipulator into time counter, but that's a rather hacky work-around. There's got to ba script out there somewhere that does it.

[Dysfunctional]

Thanks Buzzy, yes that's correct. The frame numbers are quite small and sometimes difficult to read depending on the background. If there's no way to do this then that's fine, i'll just make do with my scene text which is displaying the SMPTE data. It would save us a lot of time if there was a simple overlay option.
I'll keep looking into MAXscript.

Obviously this doesn't seem to really pose a problem for anyone. I guess most people who create previews to show the director or whatever export from AE or Premiere?