Apple Motion 3 - Manual (Page 66)

66 Chapter 1 Getting to Know Motion
To modify the current frame or duration dynamically:
m Click the center area of the field (where the numbers are), then drag to the left to
increase the value, or to the right to decrease the value.
Dragging the current frame field in this way is equivalent to dragging the playhead
through the mini-Timeline.
To switch between timecode and frame numbers, do one of the following:
m Click the current frame icon directly to the left of the current frame field.
m Click the duration icon directly to the left of the project duration field.
Clicking either icon switches between frame and timecode view for all controls in all
open projects.
Current Frame icon
Duration icon
Counting Time
Motion offers two different ways of looking at the frame numbers for your project.
You can view the time as incremental frames, starting at 1 or 0 and continuing
indefinitely. Or, you can view the time in the video-standard, eight-digit timecode
system, which runs like a clock from 00:00:00:00 to 23:59:59:29. The first two digits
represent the hours; the second two, the minutes; the third two, the seconds; and the
final two, the frames, as in HH:MM:SS:FF.
Some formats of timecode also skip numbers in order to accommodate the inexact
frame rates of certain video formats.
Both frames and timecode have advantages, depending mainly on the format with
which you are originating and finishing. For example, if you are designing a title
sequence for a 35mm film that must be exactly 720 frames, it is easier to set your
counters to frames.
If you are building a television spot that is going to be laid onto a videotape or
broadcast, you would probably benefit from setting your counters to timecode, so
that the frame numbers correspond with the numbers on the videotape.