Timecodes and the clipboard

What the time display is measured from

The number in the transport bar means different things in the two modes, and knowing which is which saves confusion.

• Unlock Mode — the time is the selected tile’s own position in its own file, shown as position / duration. It’s a per-video clock: select a different tile and the reading jumps to that file’s timeline. Zero here is the start of that file, not the start of the race.
• Lock Mode — the time is the shared timeline: time since the zero point, where 0:00 is the start of the race (the zero point you set in chapter 3), not the start of any file. It reads the same regardless of which tile is selected, because in Lock Mode selection only picks which tile you hear.

So while lining up angles in Unlock Mode you’re reading raw file times; once you Lock, you’re reading race time. That switch — from “12.4 seconds into this file” to “3.0 seconds into the race” — is the whole point of the zero point.

The clipboard timecode (Lock Mode)

Race review usually feeds another program — a stewards’ report, a form database, a spreadsheet — and the thing you want to hand it is the time on the race clock at the moment you paused. The app does this for you automatically.

Whenever playback comes to rest in Lock Mode — you pause, step a frame, release a scrub, or a backward scan hits 0:00 — the app copies the shared-timeline position to the Windows clipboard in a fixed form:

Time: 04:23.51

that is, minutes : seconds . hundredths since the zero point. Pause on the moment you care about, switch to the other program, and paste. Every copy is also written to the status history (chapter 16), so there’s a record of what was sent.

This automatic copying happens in Lock Mode only — only the shared race clock is meaningful to paste on its own, and Unlock’s per-file times aren’t that. (You can still copy an Unlock time deliberately with the Copy Timecode button, below.)

If another program has the clipboard tied up at the instant the app tries to write, a red Clipboard banner appears over the video area for a few seconds and the app quietly retries at the next rest, so a transient clash sorts itself out.

Turning the clipboard writing off

Because the app takes over the clipboard every time you pause, it can get in the way if you’re also copying and pasting other things while you review — each pause overwrites whatever you’d copied. For that, there’s a clipboard toggle in the top toolbar (to the right of the layout buttons), marked with a clipboard icon.

• Click it off and the app stops touching the clipboard of its own accord — no writing, no retrying, nothing. It’s genuinely inert, not just silent, so it can’t interfere with other applications’ clipboard use. (It governs the automatic copying only: the Copy Timecode button below still copies when you press it, which is the whole point of having it.)
• Click it on again and automatic copying resumes at the next rest.
• The toggle is remembered between runs: whatever you leave it set to when you close the app is what you get next launch. If you work for a week with it off, it stays off — you don’t have to switch it off every morning.
• Each flip is noted in the status history, so there’s a record of which state was active.

Forcing the startup state

Remembering the last state suits most people, but not everyone. If several people share a machine, or you simply want every session to begin the same way no matter how the last one ended, a setting overrides the remembered state.

In the Settings window (the gear button in the top toolbar) there’s a setting called ClipboardWriteStartup with three possible values:

Two things worth knowing:

• An override sets the starting state only — it is not a lock. You can still click the toggle during the session as usual; the next launch simply starts from the setting again.
• The app still remembers what you left it on, so if you later change the setting back to RespectPersisted, it picks up from your last actual state.

Type the value exactly as shown (spelling is not case-sensitive). Anything the app doesn’t recognise is treated as RespectPersisted, so a typo falls back to the sensible default rather than breaking anything. A fresh installation starts out as RespectPersisted.

Copying a timecode on demand

Automatic copying suits the pause-and-paste rhythm, but sometimes you just want this timecode, now, without pausing anything in particular — or you’ve turned the automatic copying off and still want a timecode occasionally. That’s the Copy Timecode button on the transport bar, beside Fast Seek.

Press it and the timecode currently showing goes to the clipboard, in exactly the same Time: 04:23.51 form the automatic writer uses — the two share one piece of formatting, so they can never drift apart. The copy is noted in the status history like any other, distinguishable there as a manual one.

What it copies follows the mode, just as the time display does:

• In Lock Mode, the shared race timeline — the same value the automatic writer would send.
• In Unlock Mode, the selected tile’s own position in its own file. (The automatic writer stays silent in Unlock Mode, but the button doesn’t: if that’s the number on screen and you want it, you can have it.)

The button is greyed out when the timeline has nothing behind it — no video loaded, or an empty tile selected in Unlock Mode.

It is separate from the automatic copying

This is the point of the button, so it’s worth being explicit. Copy Timecode is completely independent of the automatic writer and its toggle:

• It copies whenever you press it, including with the clipboard toggle switched off. “Off” stops the app copying by itself; it was never meant to stop you asking.
• Pressing it does not switch the automatic copying back on, and does not touch the toggle, what gets remembered between runs, or the ClipboardWriteStartup setting. Press it with the toggle off and the toggle is still off afterwards.
• It has no rest-position rule of its own — it doesn’t wait for a pause and doesn’t care whether you’re playing.

So a reasonable way to work, if the constant copying gets in the way, is to leave the automatic writing off and take timecodes with the button when you actually want one.

As a mouse button

Copy Timecode is also in the list of actions you can map to a mouse button (chapter 13), so it can be a thumb button rather than a trip to the transport bar. A mapped press behaves identically to clicking — same value, same format, same independence from the toggle.