The Flick: Facebook Programmers Just Invented A New Unit Of Time
Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Now the social media giant, Facebook, announces new unit of time called “Flick” on their open source page.
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
A Flick (Created by Christopher Horvath) is “the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond. The purpose of its discovery is to help sync video frame rates and it contains 1/705,600,000 of a second.
(For comparison, a nanosecond is 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, making a Flick roughly 1.41723356 nanoseconds long.)
There’s actually a very good reason for it, to make video and audio applications run more smoothly. Programmers already use built-in tools in C++ to manage the exact frame syncing, This new unit of time, Flick, solve the problem dates back to last year. Flick helps to measure individual frame duration for video frame rates in order to measure the length of each frame with a rounded number instead of a decimal.
Currently, movies are shot at 24 fps (frames per second). Which means this second split into 24 frames that is one frame is equal to .04166666667 seconds or 41666666.669 nanoseconds.
These numbers can be round up in many ways but these make things tough for the people working in visual effects, the CGI artists and programmers who need to make sure everything is in sync.
Flick offers a clean measurement and representation of a frame. For example, at 24 frames per second, each frame is 29,400,000 flicks.
