How are official times established for speedruns?
2 years ago
Michigan, USA

I know that initial speedrun times are always retimed to get them to the millisecond, given that even "live split" times are started and stopped with human error. How do moderators get rid of this human error and get an exact time to the millisecond?

I have a speedrun of Columns III on Hard in 30:16.98 according to my phone, started and stopped with human error. I expect the time to be slightly different when it's approved because of this human error. Also since I'm thinking of adding Stack Columns and Super Columns to the series one day, and I would moderate it if successfully added, I also want to know how to do that. My own human error timing (even retiming in playback) seems inadequate even for an obscure game, and I'm still pretty new to be thinking about moderating anything right now.

Finland

i use slushy's retime tool to retime run videos uploaded to youtube. you can get it here https://github.com/Slush0Puppy/retime for video files on my pc i use the nsmbw load remover to retime my run because its quite light weight compared to aviutl i used to use

Pear likes this
United States

Moderators will take the video and find the exact moment at which the speedrun starts and ends. The difference of these is the exact time.

MinecraftGaming and Merl_ like this
French Southern Territories

Retiming runs can be done in a couple of ways. For runs uploaded to youtube, I use https://retime.mcbe.wtf For runs uploaded to twitch or another platform, I download the run and then reupload it to youtube as a private video, use retime.mcbe.wtf to retime it, and then delete the video. There might be a better way to do this but I don't know of any way to retime runs done on twitch in my browser.

Minnesota, USA

For video files, I use avidemux to make a "selection" from start to end that tells me the time to the millisecond. For runs on Youtube, just use an online retime tool though like the ones suggested.

Michigan, USA

Thanks! I retimed my Columns III speedrun (still awaiting approval - small board, only one active moderator) at 30:16.600, which is 0.38 seconds faster than my phone timing! I must have started it a little early as well as stopped late. If I get a human time of 30:00.02 or something, it would actually be fairly likely that I in fact broke 30 minutes, given that I probably tend to err on the slow side with my human timing. Timing started on the frame immediately before the screen starts fading after selecting Hard mode, and ended on the frame the screen was all the way black after beating the sphinx. You can see and time it this way here: