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# Understanding Time in Kino

Time is displayed and entered using a variety of formats in Kino. The default time format is in number of Frames. The first frame is zero and not one! While frame units are very simple and straightforward, the disadvantage is that when you need to think in terms of seconds and minutes you must do some math, which can be a slow process, until you become very proficient at it. Therefore, other time formats are very helpful. If you change the time format, then it is saved with your Preferences and restored the next time you start Kino.

### Time Display Formats

Frames | A simple zero-based frame counter.
SMPTE | This "timecode" format comes from the SMPTE standards organisation. The format is HH:MM:SS:FF, where HH is hours, MM is minutes, SS is seconds, and FF is frames. Kino uses ';' instead of ':' as the last separator to indicate the use of drop-frame timecode.
Clock | This formats comes from the W3C SMIL standard. It is very similar to SMPTE timecode except it is a "pure" time format meaning it contains no mention of frames, wich is dependent upon the framerate of the video source. The format is H:MM:SS.MS, where H is hours, MM is minutes, SS is seconds, and MS is milliseconds. If there are less than three digits of milliseconds, then the number is padded with zeros.
Milliseconds | A simple milliseconds-based time counter. The first frame is at zero milliseconds. The number contains the suffix "ms" to inidcate the time unit. This is a SMIL time format.
Seconds | This is a SMIL time format SS.FFF, where SS is seconds and FFF is a fraction of a second, which is always three digits and therefore milliseconds. Note, the lack of suffix because in SMIL the default time unit is seconds.
Minutes | This is a SMIL time format MM.FFFFmin, where MM is the number of minutes and FFFF is a fraction of a minute. While SMIL does not specify a required precision, Kino always formats this time with 4 digits of precision.
Hours | This is a SMIL time format HH.FFFFFmin, where HH is the number of hours and FFFFF is a fraction of a minute. While SMIL does not specify a required precision, Kino always formats this time with 5 digits of precision. Obviously, this is probably not a very useful format, but it was added for completeness—for complete nuts!

### Time Entry

If the currently selected time format is Frames or SMPTE, then one must enter time formats using SMPTE timecode or a number with no separators is interpreted as frames. If the current format is one of the SMIL formats, then Kino interprets a "bare number" (no separators or unit suffix) as seconds. One is not required to specify all the digits of precision that Kino uses for display.

There are shortcuts for time entry. One can omit parts of a Clock or SMPTE timecode value. The parts parsed from right to left. For example, "3:16" is 3 seconds and 16 frames in SMPTE timecode, or 3 minutes and 16 seconds in Clock format. Also, digits can be ommitted between separators. For example, "1:" is one second in SMPTE format or 1 minute in clock format.

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