How Maya counts time

When you animate, Maya needs to keep track of the timing of keys. While it might seem obvious to store frames in seconds, Maya internally converts each frame's time value to a 64-bit whole number representation, which is called a tick.

Ticks

Ticks are the smallest increment of time in Maya and each represents 1/ 141,120,000 of a second. This means that Maya counts 141,120,000 ticks per second (tps), at a rate of 24 frames per second (fps) – that's 5,880,000 ticks per frame (tpf).

Even though Maya always uses the same number of ticks per second, the number of ticks per frame varies depending on which playback speed you choose. To calculate how many ticks per frame Maya uses at your selected playback speed, divide the tps (141,120,000) by the playback speed you're using.

For example, at 15 fps, you have 9,408,000 tpf (141,120,000/15).

When you use this formula on non-integer (or round-number) frame time values, for example 29.97 fps, you won't always get integers (for example, 5) as a result. Because Maya cannot set a key on a fractional frame (such as 25.55), any time Maya needs to approximate a tick value, the time is displayed with an asterisk *.

However, the Maya tick is so small (1/141,120,000th of a second) that it is extremely precise even when you use fractional frame rates (such as 24.976 or 29.97 fps).

Time precision and binary file formats

For maximum time accuracy, we recommend that you save your scenes as Maya ASCII (.ma) files. This is because versions of Maya previous to 2017 used 32-bit tick values, which had only 6000 tps. In order to maintain compatibility with these versions, time values in Maya binary files (*.mb) will continue to save using the 32-bit tick with the 1/6000th of a second time-tick duration.

This means that there may be a slight shifting of keys that are not exactly on-frame if you save to a binary file. This shift has a typically negligible effect on the animation. For example, at 24fps, frames are still accurate to 0.004 frames. This does not happen if you use Maya ASCII (.ma) files, since key times are stored as frames in these files.

Note: For newer, non-integer (or round-number) framerates, such as 23.976 and 29.97fps that are not compatible with previous versions of Maya, the tick value is slightly modified to show the exact frame values accurately. In this case, the tick duration is 1001/6000000s. This modification is temporary, and intended to allow backward compatibility with previous Maya 2017 versions.

Timeline boundaries

To avoid issues with numerical over or underflow, ticks are forced to lie in the range of 64-bit (signed) integers. Theoretically, the Maya timeline could process animations with keys from -2000 to 2000 years! However, due to fact that Maya saves binary files with a 32-bit time values, we recommend limiting animation to +/- 50 hours.