Hi again!
When synching speech audio with Synfig I find it difficult to predict where to animate because the audio software is using time only and Synfig is using a combination of time and frames. It’s also a bit confusing when you want to know the total number of frames at a time.
Is there a way to make Synfig display time like "1m 4.08s 1537f " where it displays the exact time and frame number from start? I have to do too much adding and subtracting in my head right now. 
Thanks!
Not really sure how it would affect animation or if it would help at all but you could set the framerate to 10 or 100 to give accuracy of milliseconds so as to set up keyframes and then change framerate back to what you had
It is possible to show only frames or only time or time plus frames in the range of one second. At the moment it is not possible to show time and total frames at the same widget. Probably a scond widget will be easier for implement.
Maybe it can be added in the future. I cannot promise.
-G
Hehe! Here’s a test, I just wanted to prove a point to myself, all material is made by me using only free software. Yay! 
Aha! cool!. First step is the most difficult!.
I have a workaround for the special feature request you have pointed out. You can display the current frame in the canvas using a convert type for a text parameter.
Load the file attached and see how it works:
frames.sifz (785 Bytes)
Hey, nice!
But where does the frames value node come from? Is it possible to see from where a value node was exported?
Also, I can’t get a higher resolution on the time than whole seconds, that’s where the problem is, many times I need to animate 0.3s, so I have to convert frames into fractions of a second.
In animation you think and work with frames. It’s the natural way of counting since you got the frames displayed, scrub forward a little bit and you got 4 frames, easy too see and easy to measure. When working with frames fractions of seconds like 0.3 doesn’t say anything. it’s abstract.
That said I’m sure you can add some equation to genetes on-screen counter to do what you want, I’m just not good enough with math to show you how. (btw, great tip genete!, very useful w. frame-counter in animatics and such).
See this image:
You can see the text parameter expanded:
The text parameter is a convert type from a Joined list where the first argument is a string from a real number. That real number comes from a linear convert type where the linear rate is 24 (units per second) and the offset is zero.
Perhaps reading the synfig.com/wiki/Convert page can help you about valuenodes and the convert types.
So the engine is in the linear convert type.
-G
I seem to remember that there is a environment variable to display the frame number in a text layer without having to do the convert. It’s in the Prologue source code if you want to take a look at that. I’ll try and remember to look it up for you tonight.
Chris
