Video with Ableton Live

[Ben_Binary]

Hmmm,

The only problem I have is that you can't chop (cut) video.

You have to "split" but not "crop" which means there's a lot of info being processed when you're
doing small video loops to a music track.

Z.

That sounds interesting.
Can you please explain the difference between 'split' and 'crop' for the video file in Live ?
Is it bad to loop small sections of a video clip rather than paste each part of a looping clip.

Its the small clips in the video that crap it out for me.

I have the video but want to sync it to "on the beat" rather than "on the frame" that premiere etc. use for the timeline.

[random1]

Ah.. ok..
Thought it was me, I spent about 4hrs downloading different converters, dropping in different files types trying to get it to work..
Thanks, I'll try a different app!

[jhartford]

Sometimes i think this forum is just a massive source of misinformation...

Ableton Live doesn't actually deal with video... All it does is tell quicktime what timing information and quicktime deals with the video. When you export the video, all it does is render the audio and then hands that and sync information to quicktime to render the video...

Now, very few film people have any issues with quicktime for encoding video (Adobe After Effects, for example, also uses quicktime for exports in one of its export modules... final cut pro uses quicktime for exports if you don't use compressor, etc, etc...). The only problem is that with film there are literally hundreds of codecs for encoding video so you have to get your head around the export settings to get it to work properly - H.264 and photo-jpeg are good for compressed, animation or uncompressed 8/10 bit are good for uncompressed.

So, there's nothing wrong with Live's handling of video, cause in reality it doesn't really deal with video...

There is a downside to this however - Quicktime's performance on PC is notoriously bad - when i still had a pc i had to disable hardware acceleration in my display settings in order to prevent quicktime crashing live - it wasn't compatible with my graphics card....

Those who are having issues with "bad quality" are probably exporting their video are the wrong size. If you go into your quicktime settings on export there's a size button - if it can't detect the size of your video from the files it will use the size of your video window (which is generally very low res). Set the size manually to the size of your source footage and you should be good...

(for the record - i just tested this manually with some full hd footage - i exported it using the uncompressed animation and then did the video equivalent of a phase invert test - took it into after effects, set the top layer to add and inverted it - this confirmed that they were exactly the same. The only issue i had was i didn't export the pixel aspect ratio from Live so i had to scale the Live video to 133.33333X100... )

[jhartford]

oh, and for the record - i reckon this is why video can't be used in the session view... If you've ever worked with jitter you'll know what i mean - there's a simple quicktime movie player (i can't remember what it was called and my trail's run out) which accesses the same quicktime api that live uses (this is a guess but a rather educated one...) - it allows you to load a number of videos into quicktime (ie in live the different video tracks in the arrangement view) and select which on to play (ie the way live displays only the top track) and then manipulate playback speed (i.e. live's warp markers)... what it doesn't do is allow for any kind of video mixing/blending or effects. If you allowed video in the session view it would be necessary to have this functionality because its likely that you'd want different videos on different tracks and a way to crossfade between them.

It would be possible to allow video in the session view using this api by limiting video to one track but then you would make it impossible to edit video practically in the arrangement view (because there would now only be one video track). Unless video is only active on one of your video tracks in the session view and all of them in the arrangement view... basically it just gets really messy so short of actually programming their own video handler or buy one off one of the vj programs its unlikely we'll see it anytime soon. I imagine that video in its current form was really quick to implement... getting live to handle video live a vj program - not so much...