Ableton native video track in to eSyphon In

Is it possible to import a video in to an Ableton Live audio track in arrangement view and use eSyphon In to tap the video from Ableton and process it through EbSuite effects? Am looking for a way to take advantage of EboSuite to process longer pieces of continuous video and navigate through the video easily without having to trigger the video using eClips or an eSampler/eSimpler, which means always triggering from the start of the video.

I’ve successfully used eSyphon in to tap the video output of Ableton when it is playing some of Isotonik’s World Viewer reactive visuals so assumed it would work for Ableton’s native video playback too but it doesn’t seem to.

Hi MNDMTH, I don’t think that is possible without hacks.
Isotonik’s worldviewer is not using Ableton’s video but has its own output window (and built in syphon support).

Maybe SyphonInject will work? (though this doesn’t work on recent mac os versions)

Aside from that we will try to make playback of longer files easier in the future.

Hi MNDMTH, I was thinking with Timo a bit more about ways to make it easier to play long files in Arragement View and we came up with this idea (it is a bit of a ‘creative solution’, but maybe it works for you for now):

  • drag the video clip on an audio track and turn on Warping and delete all of the Warp Markers (only the first will remain)
  • set the BPM of the clip to the BPM of the project in the sample editor of the clip
  • place Warp Markers on every beat (or every two beats, or every bar) in the waveform editor of the clip
  • save the Warp Markers
  • drag the clip into the eSampler and turn on slicing, press ‘Create slices’ and select ‘Warpmarkers’ from the list
  • create a MIDI clip on that track and draw notes chromatically starting from C1 and up on every beat (or two beats, or every bar, depending on where you created the Warp Markers).
  • now you can play the MIDI clip from any point in time and it will play the video from that point in time (when you created Warp Markers on every beat it will play the video from the next beat, when they are on every bar it will play the video from the next bar).

It is a workaround with many limitations (you can’t change the speed of the video, can’t change BPM while playing etc.), but maybe it helps!

Thanks for the suggestion. This could definitely work for some purposes. I guess another solution could be to have the video play back in another app that has syphon output that can somehow be synced to Ableton, then use SyphonIn to access the video in Ebosuite. I’m not sure what that app would be though. I wouldn’t use this approach for live performances as it’s a bit convoluted but it could be useful as a way of using eFX and ISF shaders to manipulate visuals in longer pieces of film footage.

1 Like