I’m wondering if anyone has made a tool that can show smaller units of time than what is currently already shown, i.e h:m:s. I’m working on a score for a commercial right now and it would be very handy to show the fractions of a second so that I can sync up audio cues that are perfectly in time with what’s happening on screen. Obviously, I could use another sequencer for this, but I’d prefer not to.
I made a small tool for this. It’s not really prime-time ready yet, but it seemed to work, and has not thrown any weird errors lately. I call this one TimeHelper. It’s got three main functions so far.
Show current line start time in min:sec -format.
Jump to a time in min:sec -format.
Place a delay (“marker”) at a time in min:sec -format.
The current line start time is shown by pressing a key shortcut, you can find it by name “TimeHelper”, or browsing under Global:Tools. (Not sure if this is the right place, so you might have to rebind later…). The time is shown in a small GUI, in format of [minutes]:[seconds].[hundreths of a second].
You can jump to a specific time by selecting from Tools-menu -> TimeHelper -> Jump to a time… This will bring up an automated GUI to enter in first minutes, then seconds, then hundreths of a second. In keypresses this would be as an example:
32116
This would jump into time 3 minutes, 21 seconds, 16 hundreths of a second, after the last enter pressed. Actually the jump will be placed at the closest line possible before the actual target time, given the bpm/lpb restrictions. A note about the offset will be displayed in the status bar.
You can pin point a more accurate point in time by placing a delay marker, which gives an additional resolution of 256 sublines(?) in one line. To place a delay marker, select the track and note column you want to place the marker in and then select of from Tools-menu -> TimeHelper -> Place a delay marker at time… This will jump to the closest line possible as in the Jump to time… function, and place a delay marker that will represent the closest possible time before the target time using this method. The marker seemed to constantly hit with an offset of under one hundredth of a second, even if the bpm was lowest possible and lpb was 1.
Going to push this some further, GUIwise at least. Now is like this, a pre-release at most.