Timecode & Frame Rate Calculator

A timecode calculator for editors

SMPTE timecode labels every frame of video as hours:minutes:seconds:frames. It’s how editors, colorists, sound mixers and subtitlers point to an exact moment, and how edit decision lists, logs and delivery specs describe durations. Doing timecode math by hand is error-prone — frames roll over at 24, 25 or 30 rather than 100, and drop-frame timecode skips numbers. This calculator converts, adds and subtracts timecode correctly at every common frame rate.

How to use it

1. Choose the frame rate of your project or footage.
2. Type a timecode to see its total frame count and the real time it represents — or type a frame count to get the timecode.
3. Add or subtract two timecodes, for example to find the out-point of a clip or the duration between two markers.
4. Convert a timecode to another frame rate to find the same moment in footage shot or delivered at a different rate.

Supported frame rates

• 23.976 fps — the standard for film-look video in North America. Timecode counts 24 frames per second but plays slightly slower.
• 24 fps — true cinema frame rate.
• 25 and 50 fps — PAL broadcast standards used in Europe, Pakistan, India, Australia and much of the world.
• 29.97 fps drop-frame and non-drop — NTSC broadcast in North America and Japan.
• 30, 59.94 and 60 fps — web video, gaming and high-frame-rate formats.

Drop-frame timecode explained

NTSC color video runs at 30000/1001 — about 29.97 — frames per second, slightly slower than 30. If timecode simply counted 30 frames per second, it would fall behind the wall clock by about 3.6 seconds every hour, which matters in broadcast where programs must fit exact slots. Drop-frame timecode fixes this by skipping two frame numbers, ;00 and ;01, at the start of every minute except minutes divisible by ten. No video frames are removed — only labels. After 00:00:59;29 comes 00:01:00;02, and one hour of drop-frame timecode (01:00:00;00) is frame 107,892, within a few milliseconds of a real hour. At 59.94 fps, four numbers are skipped instead of two.

Drop-frame timecode is written with a semicolon before the frames; non-drop uses a colon. The calculator flags timecodes that can’t exist in drop-frame, such as 00:01:00;00.

Timecode versus real time

For 23.976, 29.97 non-drop and 59.94 non-drop, timecode and real time drift apart: one hour of non-drop timecode at 29.97 fps actually lasts 1 hour 3.6 seconds. The calculator always shows the real elapsed time next to each result, so you can check running times for delivery or compare against audio recorded on a clock.

Syncing subtitles to an edit? Use the Subtitle Time Shifter. Planning exports? Estimate file sizes with the Video Bitrate Calculator, and check frame sizes with the Aspect Ratio Calculator.