- [Instructor] When celluloid was the most popular medium,
we needed to find a way to measure time.
One obvious way was to count the number of frames.
It's simple, certain, and uncomplicated.
Frame counts are still used today,
particularly in animation production,
but a a more advanced system was developed for celluloid
that used carefully spaced numbers pre-printed,
burned into the edge of the film.
One problem with both frame counts and edge numbers
is that it can take quite a lot of effort to use them
to work out the hours, minutes, seconds,
and frames they represent, which we need to get a sense
of playback duration.
When video technology came along,
it was an opportunity to add a new system of measurement:
Timecode.
Timecode stores a number on every frame of video.
In fact, timecode is used for audio too and a number
of other industrial technologies.
A timecode number displays the hour, minute, second,
and frame of a particular image.
Anytime you see a series of eight numbers separated
by colons or semicolons, you're almost certainly looking
at timecode.
It's used to identify exactly where you are in time
for a particular piece of media, sequence, conversation,
and so on.
It's a simple feature, but an extremely important one.
Because the number of frames per second can vary,
the number of frames displayed in the last number
of timecode might be different
from one piece of footage to the next.
You can work out the frame rate for footage
by looking at the moment a clip jumps back to zero frames.
If your footage gets to 23 frames and jumps back to zero,
you have 24-frame-per-second footage.