Time line in fractions of a second?

themuseboy · Post by **themuseboy** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 2:06 pm

I'm a newbie, I have had Anime Studio 5.6 Pro for about 2 weeks now. So far I love the product, it looks like it will do what I want and more.

But I can't seem to figure out a small problem.

I'm creating an animated listening map with a bumble bee (yes a newbie drawing a bee) The bee needs to hit flowers timed to music. I know the exact time I need him to hit a flower but the time does not show me fractions of a second. So I have to guess. The times are 17:02 sec, 18:23 sec, 21:16 sec, etc.

Is there a way to get the time line to show fractions of a second?

Any help would be appreciated.

Oh, when done rendering the clips I use Vegas Pro 8 to put the clips together and add the music.

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 2:34 pm

Two solutions occur to me. One is to set the program settings in AS to 100 frames per second -- then you should be able to time actions to the nearest 100th of a second. The other solution is to just shoot in very small segments, and piece the segments together in a video editor (most will give fractions of a second). Then you can just edit each segment to the beat. This is probably a better solution if you don't want to deal with exotic fps settings -- but you can probably adapt them fairly easily anyway...

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 2:50 pm

Unfortunately you have to do it the old-fashioned way and calculate frame numbers. You need two things for this:
1. the frame rate of your project - could be 25 or 30
2. the time format of your musical cue.

A common format would be SMPTE, which would read like this: in "17:23" 17 is the number of secionds, and 23 is the number of frames. This would be easy to calculate as it corresponds with the frame count in AS.

A sequencer program like Cubase or Logic can show you the SMPTE position of any note easily. You only have to choose the correct SMPTE format, because it exists for every common framerate: 24 (film only), 25 (PAL TV), 30 and its odd relatives like 29,something (NTSC).

If your times are in seconds:centiseconds, then you divide the numbers behind the decimal point by three which gives you the number of frames. Add this to the number of seconds times 30. (this is for a project frame rate of 30 fps.)

themuseboy · Post by **themuseboy** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 2:55 pm

Thanks jahnocli,

I understand your first suggestion and will give it a try when I get home today. And since this is the only clip that needs this close precision going up to 100 fps should not be a problem. All the other clips that I am making for this listening map don't need this much precision.

I'm not sure I understand your second suggestion.

themuseboy · Post by **themuseboy** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 4:01 pm

Thank you slowtiger,

Just so we are on the same page here. When I said 17:23 I am pulling this out of Vegas while looking at the music as an analog image in the time line. I am assuming it is 17 Seconds 23 hundredths of a second. Could I be assuming incorrectly, we all know what happens when we assume.

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 4:24 pm

You could also use a visual fps converter, to convert the fractions to frames, depending if its 24, 25 or 30 fps.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 5:17 pm

Hey, that's a good one. I was struggling with my old pocket calculator, but your graph is much more intuitive.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Apr 11, 2008 1:17 am

Uh... can't you just set the preferences to SMPTE Time code?

That has fractions of a second in the time line.

Shoot... I was going to post this earlier but was too tired... and I learned about it here so figured someone else would do it.

-vern

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Fri Apr 11, 2008 2:35 am

No, Vern, it hasn't got fraction of seconds in the timeline; only whole seconds (00:00:01:00). The frame number is just the number of seconds and the frame (0 .. 23 in your example).

This means you still have to eyeball the fractions of a second. If you're used to 24 fps, that isn't an issue, because if you do it long enough, you know, for instance, that 18 frames past one second is 1.75 seconds.

Is the exposure sheet formatted to deal with these kinds of issues. I mean, you write on your X-sheet where an action starts and stops. I could imagine the X-sheet to be modified to include a decimal scale for the vertical timeline.