Time stamping on movies

[jimsimons]

Admittedly, I've only started figuring out what Magic Lantern can do for me.  The audio level displays and "take a picture when the scene changes" are great.

What about adding timestamps to movies frames?  Ideally this would be down to hundredths of a second.  This would be extremely useful when filming sports.

[dmilligan]

You already have a timestamp for the movie start (the file timestamp, there may also be some metatdata in the mov container, IDK), and you also know the fps => it's possible to simply calculate the time for each frame. This would be really easy to compute with an ActionScript in AE (if you're using AE).

Ideally this would be down to hundredths of a second.

The timing of frames *relative* to each other would be accurate to hundredths of a second (again b/c you know the fps to more than hundredths of a second accuracy), but the file timestamp won't be. But it couldn't be anyway, the clock on the camera is not accurate to hundredths of a second (and even if it was, there's no way to set it or synchronize it in a manner that is accurate to hundredths of a second => you can only set the clock manually with buttons).

However, if you had a GPS enabled camera, it *might* be possible to timestamp frames with an accuracy of microseconds or perhaps nanoseconds (perhaps a higher accuracy than even the fps timers). I'd love to hear a compelling use case for that though.