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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the about-time dept.

Facebook invented a new time unit called the 'flick' and it's truly amazing

So what is a flick? A flick is one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second — 1/705,600,000 if you prefer the digits, or 1.417233560090703e-9 if you prefer decimals. And why is that useful?

As a hint, here's a list of numbers into which 1/706,600,000 divides evenly: 8, 16, 22.05, 24, 25, 30, 32, 44.1, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100, 120. Notice a pattern? Even if you don't work in media production, some of those numbers probably look familiar. That's because they're all framerates or frequencies used in encoding or showing things like films and music. 24 frames per second, 120 hertz TVs, 44.1 KHz sample rate audio.

[...] Even the weird NTSC numbers in use due to certain technical constraints divide nicely. 23.976 (technically 24*(1,000/1,001)=23.976023976230 with the last 6 digits repeating) becomes exactly 29,429,400 flicks. It's the same for 29.97, 59.94, and any others like them. No more fractions or decimals needed whatsoever! How great is that?!

There is more detail and background information on GitHub.

Do you give a flick? How many flicks do you feel you have wasted on this article?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:02AM (#627066)

    It's right there in TFS.

    And why is that useful?

    As a hint, here's a list of numbers into which 1/706,600,000 divides evenly: 8, 16, 22.05, 24, 25, 30, 32, 44.1, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100, 120. Notice a pattern? Even if you don't work in media production, some of those numbers probably look familiar. That's because they're all framerates or frequencies used in encoding or showing things like films and music. 24 frames per second, 120 hertz TVs, 44.1 KHz sample rate audio.

    [...] No more fractions or decimals needed whatsoever!

    As in, you can have precise synchronization between different framerates, with integers only. If you ever opened a subtitle file, you know it's all a mess of "00:00:23,147 --> 00:00:28,301" this and "{1475}{1673}" that. There are also all kinds of issues with video/audio/subtitle synchronization, especially when combining tracks from different sources.

    I guess "flicks" are supposed to be the baseline timestamp in which all other (relevant for FB) timestamps can be expressed as integers. Of course, we'll likely end up with this instead. [xkcd.com]