Facebook announces a new unit of time to help sync video frame rates

A flick (frame-tick) is a very small unit of time. It measures 1/705600000 of a second.

Facebook has launched a new unit of time, like seconds, minutes or hours. But it is very small in measure and is slightly greater than a nanosecond which is 1/1,000,000,000 of a second. The new unit of time developed by Facebook will be called a “Flick” which hints towards “frame-tick”. Flicks are designed to help measure individual frame duration for video frame rates. Facebook has announced the new invention over its official Twitter account linking it to GitHub document.

Second is considered one of the few units which are universal across SI and imperial units. Now you might be thinking that what was wrong with regular seconds, microseconds or nanoseconds, that Facebook had to invent Flicks. So here’s a short answer for you. The nanoseconds don’t equally divide common film & media framerates. That’s why Facebook thought of developing this unit. So, even if your video is 24hz, 25hz, 30hz, 48hz, 50hz, 60hz, 90hz, 100hz, or 120hz, you will still be able to use Flicks to ensure that everything is in sync while using whole integers (instead of decimals) at the same time.

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

Programmers use built-in tools in C++ to organize these type of exact frame syncing, especially while working on visual effects. They require nanoseconds to do this job, which doesn’t divide evenly. Now after the invention of this new unit they will be easily able to divide frame rates easily using Flicks.

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