How Maya Creative counts time

Ticks

Ticks are the smallest increment of time in Maya Creative and each represents 1/ 141,120,000 of a second. This means that Maya Creative 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 Creative 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 Creative 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 Creative cannot represent every fractional frame rate (such as 25.55). Any time Maya Creative needs to approximate a tick value, the time is displayed with an asterisk *.

However, the Maya Creative 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

In order to be backward-compatible, we recommend that you save your scenes as Maya Creative ASCII (.ma) files.