I have been making visual music using Ableton since 2014, and felt like I was living in the pre-MIDI historical ages all these years, until EboSuite came along. I’m very excited to have the eSampler and all these cool new ways to make music with my videos, but I’m frustrated that I can’t do the thing that’s an integral part of my process:
- My process starts in FCP X, where I take multi-channel audio and video recordings of a live music performance, and I create video stems for each channel (they’re available for free download here: Remix The Music — Remix ⟷ Culture).
- I export them as Apple Pro Res 422HQ / 96kHz.
- I convert these stems to PhotoJPEG
- I drag the photojpeg video stem into Ableton’s arrangement view
- I warp, cut, copy, paste until I have a nice loop.
- Because of my several cuts, the loop usually is comprised of more than one clip in the arrangement view.
With the eArrangement plugin + the eConvert plugin - I am not able to select more than 1 clip in my arrangement view track and have the whole loop converted to HAP as a single file. I have to drag and drop each cut clip one at a time to create different files. And actually, when I drag the single clip from the arrangement track into the eConvert plugin, it shows a green progress bar go from left to right, but when it reaches the right it just stays there forever and never finishes converting the file.
- Since 2014, I’ve always used the Export Audio/Video to render these edited loops at the highest quality HAP setting and 48kHz audio. And this worked great until Live 10.x when Ableton decided to simplify the video export settings and only offer 3 encoding options (and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio). To work around this, I kept my older 10.x Ableton so that I could export video to HAP / high quality.
- Now that I’m on an M1 machine and using Ebosuite 2, I can’t go back and forth between Live 10 for rendering and Live 11 for Ebosuite and M1 compatiblity. So I’m stuck in Live 11 for better or for worse. I was really hoping this eConvert would solve this problem by allowing me to create my video loops from the arrangement as highest res HAP and 24-bit/48kHz audio.