When does the timer start?

[dbartholomae]

Hi there! I would like to use this plugin for the following use case:
I have an intro scene that I would like to screenshot to create thumbnails. Basically I want to take a screenshot 4 seconds after the scene started. I don't mind the script to try to take more screenshots after 8/12/ 16/... seconds as the scene is automatically switched, but it would be important that the screenshot is consistently taken 4 seconds after screen start. When I tried it, the screenshots seemed to be happening at different times, though.
Would this be somehow possible?

[synap5e]

The timer should start after the scene is made visible.

I did some testing and as far as I can tell this is happening correctly.
I used a desktop capture of a clock, and used a 4s timer on the filter attached to that source.
I switched from an empty scene to the scene containing the capture and afaict the screenshot was always appearing 4s after, and every 4s after that if I stayed in the scene.

Here I switched to the scene at ...160 for 10s then back to the empty and then again to the scene at ...180

[dbartholomae]

I've set up with 4 seconds and I've tried twice here:

As you see, the screenshots are less than 4 seconds apart, and do not start at the beginning of the scene (the text on the bottom is not typed out yet).

Here's my filter config:

                {
                    "balance": 0.5,
                    "deinterlace_field_order": 0,
                    "deinterlace_mode": 0,
                    "enabled": true,
                    "flags": 0,
                    "hotkeys": {},
                    "id": "screenshot_filter",
                    "mixers": 0,
                    "monitoring_type": 0,
                    "muted": false,
                    "name": "Screenshot",
                    "prev_ver": 436207618,
                    "private_settings": {},
                    "push-to-mute": false,
                    "push-to-mute-delay": 0,
                    "push-to-talk": false,
                    "push-to-talk-delay": 0,
                    "settings": {
                        "capture_hotkey": [],
                        "destination_folder": "D:/stream/thumbnails",
                        "interval": 4.0,
                        "raw": false,
                        "timer": true
                    },
                    "sync": 0,
                    "versioned_id": "screenshot_filter",
                    "volume": 1.0
                }

[synap5e]

Hmm thats odd you seem to be getting different results from my test...
I'm noticing now the timestamps on my images written are also not in sync with the timestamps/delay for when the image is taken. The timestamp on the filename can be out of sync from when the image is grabbed, since that is the save-time not the grab-time but I'm surprised how much delay is there.

Not capturing the first frame of the scene is expected - with 4s it should only capture the frame at 00:04.

Would you be able to try with 2 new scenes, one completely empty and one with a clock on it (e.g. like how I used desktop capture of https://time.is/Unix_time_now) and the filter on the source + no reuse of the source/scene anywhere else in OBS.

If it still seems odd, maybe there's something different with your scene setup. Having the scene/source referenced in a different scene could cause the timer to still fire in both scenes.

[dbartholomae]

Here's the screenshots: The first two happened immediately after the scene started, not after 4 seconds, as can be seen that I was still in the process of bringin the timer into view (pressing Alt-Tab just after clicking the scene).