When obtaining values from the system, such as current framerate, the value is often a string such as ‘film’.

eg.

Is there a good way of converting from the string values to numeric, without generating my own lookup table?

Conversely I’d also like to be able to go from a string value to time, such as ‘1000millisec’, is there any way of doing that other than the current (dodgy) way I’ve found?

any help much appreciated

i cant seem to find anything for it actually, which is surprising.

This seemed to have a nice idea, although in mel and working with linear units rather than time, same principle applies.

http://xyz2.net/mel/mel.102.htm

Lee Dunham | Character TD
ldunham.blogspot.com

Thanks for the reply, it’s nice to know I’m not alone in thinking it’s weird.

Look like some sort of lookup table like the mel link you posted is the way to go, I’ll post back my solution once I’ve written it.

Also thought it was curious that you can add SMPTE Timecode to the scene, but there is no way of querying it at any time other than the specified ‘Frame Start=Production Time Start’ point.