Facebook has announced a new unit of time called Flicks. The attempt at altering reality as we know it is aimed at video production; intentionally creating a new method of measuring frame rates that will align better with monitor refresh rates.
The ideas is that a Flick (short for Frame-Tick) is equal to 1/705600000 seconds. Making it larger than a nanosecond, but is more capable of representing the amount of time a single frame takes up. Ideally, this allows video editors to sync frames using whole integers, without having to resort to using dedicated scripts to deal with the multiple decimal points of a nanosecond.
A GitHub page has been set up to share the details of this new timing mechanism, and to help video teams adopt the standard.
We’ve launched Flicks, a unit of time, slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies. https://t.co/w9SDBznXRE
— Facebook Open Source (@fbOpenSource) January 22, 2018
Whether it will actually catch on its another story. It’s not unusual for a large corporation to attempt to introduce new standards, but few have gone so far as to attempt to unilaterally declare a new measurement of time based on video playback.
[Source: GitHub]
