If you want to use just ordinary frames, of course you can do that. Okay, so that's all if you want to use SMPTE. This would correspond to a video editing situation in which we wanted our next cut to begin at exactly five seconds and zero frames, and we only render up to frame 429. I'll just use the spinner and click the down arrow once, and I go to 429 instead of just typing it in. This is a little bit easier to see what's going on. In fact, I could use the little arrows here to do that. If I wanted exactly five seconds of animation, I could either start on frame one, like this, and now I have five seconds of animation, or I could use SMPTE conventions, and I could start on frame zero and run until frame four seconds and 29 frames. It's merely the end time minus the start time, but it's telling us a wrong result, that we only have five seconds and zero frames, when in fact we actually have an extra frame here. This length field up here, I would completely block that out of your mind and pretend it doesn't exist, because it makes no sense. And we can see over here we have frame counters telling us that our duration is five seconds and one frame. And now what we have here is five seconds of animation, plus one frame, because we're stopping on the first frame of second number five, and we're actually going to include that within our clip. Then we could put in here an end time of five seconds and zero frames. And let's say we wanted five seconds of animation. And now our start time is on the time code of zero. ![]() I can go up here to time display and switch it over to SMPTE, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and we get time code. If you wish to view the timeline with seconds and frames, then this start time of frame zero starts to make sense. ![]() And you can use that especially if you're working in a video production environment. ![]() Now in some programs, animation always starts from frame one. The first thing that's unorthodox here is that the start time is frame zero. Then we come to the animation range or the current time range, and this is a little bit confusing. We can also turn looping off if we want, but I'm going to leave it on for now. And the only reason we would want this on is if we had a very heavy scene that should only update in one viewport. I like to turn that off, and when that's off, all of the viewports will update when we play an animation. Then we have the active viewport only switch. It's enabled by default, and we want to leave it enabled, so that 3DS Max will play back at the current frame rate. There are only a couple of things I want to point out here. Alright, moving on, we have the playback section. And that's the time base or resolution internally, and that allows us to switch the frame rate without changing the total time. And the mechanism that allows you to do this is the fact that 3DS Max subdivides time into elements known as ticks, and a tick is one 48/100th of a second. So what happened was 3DS Max resampled that segment of time at 25 frames per second instead of 30. It went from being 100 frames to 83 frames. The values changed, and also our timeline changed. And when I press enter, watch what happens down here. If I want to go for a European standard, I would put in 25 frames per second. You can change the frame rate without changing the length of the animation. But the good news is that you can switch between different frame rates using this custom and this input field here. It only supports whole-number frame rates. So this is slightly misleading or inaccurate, because 3DS Max currently does not support fractional frame rates like 29.97 frames per second. For example, NTSC, if I select that, actually runs at 30 frames per second in 3DS Max, but the real standard, the National Television Standards Committee analog TV standard, was not 30 frames per second for color TV, it was 29.97 frames per second. And that is because these labels can be a bit misleading or ambiguous. I recommend that you stay away from these buttons and just go directly to the custom button and plug in your frame rate here. And it's got some acronyms here: NTSC and PAL, and also a button labeled film. And here's where we can set up our frame rate, the length of our timeline, and so on. ![]() It's a little clock with a gear next to it. And that is a button at the very bottom of the main window, and it's next to all of the transport controls for the time slider here. Opening the chapter on keyframe animation, we'll begin by checking out the time configuration for 3DS Max.
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