Facebook's virtual reality division Oculus has invented a new unit of time, called flick, which is intended to help make video and audio editing more precise.
A flick is the smallest unit of time that is larger than a nanosecond but smaller than a microsecond. It is exactly one 705 600 000th of a second. It is a unit of time defined in the programming language C++.
In a post on GitHub, it is explained that this specific number is useful because it can divide into numbers such as 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100, 120, without any decimal places. These numbers represent a single frame duration for different formats used to capture video and audio.
For example, most films are shots in 24fps (frames per second) which means there are 24 still frames in each second of the movie. Previously, editing these individual frames was difficult and messy because each frame was represented by a nanosecond that had an infinite number of recurring decimal places.
This type of precision editing is useful in animation work and virtual reality to make the end product smoother and clearer for the viewer.
"When working creating visual effects for film, television and other media, it is common to run simulations or other time-integrating processes which subdivide a single frame of time into a fixed, integer number of subdivisions. It is handy to be able to accumulate these subdivisions to create exact 1-frame and 1-second intervals, for a variety of reasons," the Oculus team explains.
The GitHub post says flicks "makes it suitable for use via std::chrono::duration and std::ratio for doing timing work against the system high resolution clock, which is in nanoseconds, but doesn't get slightly out of sync when doing common frame rates".
The team says this time unit began as a technical question posted publicly on Facebook by Christopher Horvath, a former architect at Oculus Story Studio.
Facebook has open-sourced all documentation surrounding the creation of the flick, meaning it can be downloaded by any developer who wants to add support for the unit in their software.
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