Kudos and deaf ears

Is your FX timing issue music based?  Typically I try to design my base FX at approx 1/2 or 1/3 speed in order to get the kind of granularity I like on the timing side.  That way I can use the rate function in the Sub/Cue level and get .001 precision - just like you are doing.    Over time these effects can begin to loose some of their exactness - the first 20 seconds looks fine, but you loose sync after awhile.  Max granularity would be to build your FX in 1/9 speed and use rates of 900% or so.   For Example with a cycle time of 5 seconds a rate of 901 vs 902 yields approx .0006 secs of granularity.

There is a BPM function in the 2.1 release which should help with doing some of this math.

If you've got specific situations you'd like to break down we might be able to come up with solutions.

Is your FX timing issue music based?  Typically I try to design my base FX at approx 1/2 or 1/3 speed in order to get the kind of granularity I like on the timing side.  That way I can use the rate function in the Sub/Cue level and get .001 precision - just like you are doing.    Over time these effects can begin to loose some of their exactness - the first 20 seconds looks fine, but you loose sync after awhile.  Max granularity would be to build your FX in 1/9 speed and use rates of 900% or so.   For Example with a cycle time of 5 seconds a rate of 901 vs 902 yields approx .0006 secs of granularity.

There is a BPM function in the 2.1 release which should help with doing some of this math.

If you've got specific situations you'd like to break down we might be able to come up with solutions.

It is music based, and I'm on 2.0 right now.

 If I understand this correctly I need to design an effect exactly the way I want it then increase the cycle time to really slow it down THEN increase the overall rate in the cue which will really give me a more precise control.  I didn't thing that was how it worked.  It seemed to me the cue rate and the effect cycle time did pretty much the same thing, but you're saying "not exactly"?

Spoke with Dan - the developer who handles the effects side of the world - and the Effect engine indeed operates at 1ms intervals (.001)  The cycle/step times are restricted to .01 seconds partially for simplicity and partially because the DMX refresh is 22ms - so the need for more specificity isn't apparent at first. 

The magic trick is finding a way to access the 1ms control we want in a 10ms world.

Rate is a math function applied to the cycle time that can do just that.    I doubt it was intended to be used in this way - but math is math.   If you have a large rig of super fast gear (strobes for instance) you can "see" this math.  Put all the strobes in a step effect with steps of .01 and a .5 second dwell time.  Begin to increase the rate - you will see the density of the effect increase as your step times get faster then .01 seconds.   Once your rate gets too high the dwell time will breach the DMX refresh rate (22ms) and the effect density will actually decrease as the information misses it's window to get out of the desk.  The High and the low occur inside the DMX refresh and thus never "happen" on stage.  

So in the example I mentioned - If you are looking for a time close to  .5 seconds you can manually set the cycle time to .5 or .49

If you make the cycle time 4.5 seconds - you can use a rate of 900 to get to .5 (4.5/9.00 = .5) or a rate of 901 (4.5/9/01 = .49944)

We don't  have access to the full .00056 seconds of granularity the math creates - but there are gains there.

Typically I make my step times or cycles either 1 or 2 seconds and then use BPM to calc a rate :  ((Step Time)*(60)/BPM)*100 = the rate.  For effects that need to run for longish periods of time I try to get to a rate of around 300 in order to have some wiggle room.

Obviously over a long enough period of time you will begin to loose sync to the music regardless - there's all those little rounded remainders that begin to add up - the technique above just makes those remainders smaller.