Clip "Pre-Roll" offset?

Hey gang,

Started messing with some percussive clips today, and was wondering how to solve this kind of problem:

If you have a video clip of someone striking a drum, and you set the start point to when the stick hits the drum head, you lose a vital part of the visual: the drum stick heading towards the drum.

In an eSampler, I wonder if there could be a way to identify the “hit” trigger point, but then have some sort of adjustable pre-roll time slider that can reveal the footage leading up to the “hit.”

Then somehow you would need to tell Ableton to read the midi notes, and auto-offset them earlier by that pre-roll amount so the “hit” still is triggered at the correct time…?

I’m sure you guys have thought about something like this, and it definitely feels like a “pro” feature only hard-core nerds like myself would use! haha

Any thoughts?

Cheers!

Hi Josh

Yes that is a good point. We have some nice features planned for next updates to help you manage that better.

For now what I do is that I copy the eSampler with the percussive sample to another pad in the drumrack, and then set that eSampler to Video Only and give the sample a new start point: at the moment where the drum stick is still in the air and not hitting the drum yet. Now, if you edit this sample just before the percussive sample it will show the motion before the hit.
Because it is on video only the sound doesnt interfere with the rest of the sounds of the video beat. You can play around with the start point and positioning of that sample to find the right visual effect. If you set the start point further away from the original start point, but position it close to the original sample, the visual effect will get more ‘cartoony’ and the visual rhythm more snappy (If that makes any sense :P).
For me this trick works well, I hope you can use it too.

If you downloaded the example pack and open the eSampler Ableton project you can find some examples of this trick in the drumracks.
http://www.ebostudio.info/EboSuite/EboSuite_Examples.zip

Oh excellent! Thank you for the tip…very smart! I’ll give that a shot. Cheers! :v:

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Looking forward to your tracks :sunglasses:

Hi Josh,
We just released EboSuite 1.2. This update adds the ‘PreRoll’ feature. This feature is designed to make it easier to add a “Pre-Roll note”. You can read more about it in the manual on page 19 and 20.
Download the new installer here.

THANKS MAN! I’ll check this out asap! Cheers!

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