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Really this is a pretty silly and pointless feature, but it would be a neat little addition. Track how long a file is open for, and remember it. A counter that will tell you how long you've worked on a project for, over a length of time. That way if you work on a large project for a long time you can see just how many hundreds of hours you put into it.

Ah, but why would you even want to know? How many drawings too, I suppose, and how many times you previewed the project, lifted your stylus and drew a line of what length? But I don't understand why people count the minutes it took them to draw something either, so maybe I'm about to find out.

Other then the novelty of knowing how long you've worked on something for, what I would find useful about it would be for future planning. I don't sit down and animate every day for a set period of time. Sometimes I work for a long while, other times just an hour or so. Then if after several weeks I finished something and I wanted to try and schedule out how long another animation would take, I would know the actual amount of time I worked on it without needing to keep a time sheet of sorts detailing when I was working.

Well, in that case there's a really nifty plugin called, Backup that the Youngmonkey sells on his Youngmonkey website and that comes with just the sort of timer you are looking for. It's designed to tell you how long it has been since you last made a backup. Even if you worked none stop for days or months, it would keep count of your hours. Of course, in your case you would spoil it if you backed up so you would have to fight the urge and not let it scare you into doing what you should be doing.

Sometimes it's necessary to keep track of the amount of time I spend with a project: when I get paid by the hour. But counting just my time in TVP wouldn't be enough. I use a piece of paper to write down my times. My girlfriend uses some application on the Mac designed for this purpose. You will find lots of those solutions for every OS, but they all require that you have the discipline to note your start and stop times yourself.

For these cases I apply the ancient Czech method (which I suspect comes from the German) of using a "Haus numero", or house numbers. This just means that you look up and down a street and write down any house number that strikes your fancy. I use the same methodology to figure out my film budgets, which always turn out to be accurate.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:For these cases I apply the ancient Czech method (which I suspect comes from the German) of using a "Haus numero", or house numbers. This just means that you look up and down a street and write down any house number that strikes your fancy. I use the same methodology to figure out my film budgets, which always turn out to be accurate.

LOL

Actually Paul is referring to "Hausnummer" in the sense of "estimate". It's a common german saying to ask "Geben Sie mir mal ne Hausnummer", meaning "Just give me a rough estimate". The american equivalent calls for a "ball park".

stiletto wrote:Really this is a pretty silly and pointless feature, but it would be a neat little addition. Track how long a file is open for, and remember it. A counter that will tell you how long you've worked on a project for, over a length of time. That way if you work on a large project for a long time you can see just how many hundreds of hours you put into it.

our Cyborg Lemec have made such a tool times ago, a plug called "Taximeter" or something like,
but I can't remember if it was attached to a project (open/close) session, or to the application use (tvpa Start/Quit) .