How Maya counts time

When you animate, Maya needs to keep track of the timing of keys. 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 rate, for example 29.97 fps, you won't always get integers (for example, a whole number, like 5) as a result. This is because Maya cannot represent every fractional frame rate (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).

Note: To avoid issues with numerical over or underflow, ticks are forced to lie in the range of 64-bit (signed) integers.

Time precision and binary file formats

In order to be backward-compatible, we recommend that you save your scenes as Maya ASCII (.ma) files. Since Maya 2018, binary files are saved in 64bit format, which makes Maya binary files (*.mb) incompatible with earlier versions of Maya.