Scrolling Years - animated timeline — Beware of "influencers"
Part 1:
I've recently seen an influencer video (I won't say who's... here...) that annoyed me because he said "due to some significant bugs" he'd been running into with Apple Motion, that the project would be a "regular" Motion project to be exported out as video later. Well... Numbers is "special" and does not always behave as you might expect it to — there's a lot in Motion going on "under the hood" that may look like Numbers "gets wrong"... but generally... it really doesn't. The "complaint" of bugs made me start working on this... I didn't find any on the Motion side.
And this ALSO happens far too often in many influencer videos: starting the project with a size ("whatever you like") and a ***frame rate you typically work with*** (and/or: "it doesn't matter") and then they select 29.97. [(***of course it bleeding matters*** — the project size does too for certain things.)]
Why would anyone want to do this? 29.97 is a HACK, both analog and digital. It was an analog hack to keep chroma information from causing interference with the original B&W (NTSC) broadcast signal - it was used to keep people who had already purchased (very expensive - back in those days) B&W TV sets from *being forced to buy* new (even more expensive) Color TVs when color was introduced. The actual frame rate is 29.97002997002997002997002997002997... forever. There isn't a computer made that can handle this data — so a new hack is applied to "emulate" it. It's just EXTRA WORK the computer has to do for compatibility. Why would you want this??? on any level???
Now, if the influencer let it go a the "frame rate you typically work with" and didn't actually show the frame rate they were going to use for the project, that would be one thing — but what you, the viewer sees is: the influencer picks 29.97 and if you're following along, you probably would too. The influencer complained about bugs... this is definitely an issue that could make it seem that way... I won't go into the details but suffice it to say: this post may just prove that "FRAME RATES DO MATTER"!
You can see and work the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wrQ8l3_CnU
The influencer goes on to start the project with a Numbers generator and to "locate the animate checkbox — this is where the first of *many bugs* on this project came into play — and he actually *needed* to disable it. They go on to keyframe the Value from 2000 to 2024 over 24 frames — should have been 25 frames but they account for this a little later on with a **different** parameter (Replicator Points).
Continued in Part 2...