How can I best work with long videos in arrangement view?

Ideas
1

I’m a new user as of today. This suite of plugins is really cool, so looking forward to learn!

The workflows demoed in the demo/sample pack is cool and I understand how to work with eClips and eSampler.

I’m curious though: do any of you work with long videos in the arrangement view? My first task with Ebo is to prepare a live mashup set. Some parts of the set will rely on having 3-5 minutes of prepared video(s) running in tandem/background, with the addition of some sampler stuff on top. What’s your recommended workflow here? It’s a little hard to work in Session view with these long clips imho. I understand Ebo doesn’t work natively with videos in Arrangement view?

I guess I could chop up the videos in sample layers, but that seems a little cumbersome. If I have just one long sample, I would be pretty limited wrt looping? I’m really curious if you have some real world examples.

~tobiasn

2

Hi Tobias, unfortunately Ableton gives us very limited access to the data in the Arrangement View timeline. Therefore eClips works for clips in Session View only. We are thinking about concepts to make it easier to work with longer videos in Arrangement View, because a sampler is not ideal for triggering long clips.

I personally use Arrangement View to produce tracks in the studio and I use Session View to perform tracks live. I record the tracks with Syphon recorder and then I cut them up in parts (like intro, break, drop etc.) and load those parts in Session View clipslots. Live I’ll arrange/mix/combine those parts with my controller (I’ve been using the APC key25 a lot lately). For complex transitions I use scenes to trigger multiple clips at the same time. I use eSamplers to trigger videos live on top of the tracks and I use audiovisual effects (eFX) stacks a lot on the master track mainly, but sometimes on individual tracks as well. That is super fun. I also use midiclips with video scratch patterns every now and then to trigger eSamplers to create live video scratches.

I am curious how other people use EboSuite Live and we are very open for ideas and suggestions to improve EboSuite, so I hope more people will tell a bit about their live set-up in this thread.

3

Thanks for the insight @Jeroen! I’ll fiddle around some and see where it takes me. The Ebo workflow is new to me and opens up so many new creative ways to work visually. It’s just 12 hours since I learned about its existence, so I’ll get into it soon enough :slight_smile:

Very curious too to hear from others’ experiences. I’ll post about mine.

This is now posted from High Sierra, so I’ll crack on now and check that everything is working! :rocket:

1 Like
4

So, I found a couple of ways to solve my first challenge.

For context: I wanted to mix three videos. The crossfader makes some of this easy: One is overlayed all of the time, while I want to switch between the other two in the background (for now at least).

The challenge I had yesterday was: how do I program/finetune/monitor the fades/switches between the two background videos without having to restart the whole 5 minute tune all the time?
This challenge is, to be fair, more of a preproduction one. So, I take it, not really something Ebo is built for. But Ebo can help to simplify this workflow quite a bit compared to what I was doing before (Premiere and After Effects), with the added upside that I can take this on the road later and mix it up with ease.

On to what I’m doing now. It’s most about leveraging Ableton’s native functionality wrt clips, so might be old news for most of you, but new to me.

I have now 4 tracks. One with the finished, mixed audio, and three tracks with eClips. I have 3 videoclips with 4:40 length.

1. Legato mode

Super basic for switching quickly between videos live. I place the two alternating clips on the same track, switch on the Legato Launch mode in the Launch panel. When playing the scene, I can alternate between/launch the two background clips, and they will keep the position. Legato makes the clip inherit the play head from the previous playing clip. This was news to me yesterday. This is more akin to what you could do with Live’s native video functionality, just quicker.

2. Follow actions

With Follow actions, you can pretty much emulate an arrangement view in the session view. It takes a couple of minutes to set up (and might be a nightmare to change things later, idk yet :grin:) but it’s quite powerful. Follow actions are versatile, but here I use it to launch the next clip in the track after X bars.
My clips are 102 bars. I clone them 26 times, increase the start position by 4 bars for each new clone, and set all clips’ Follow action to play next clip after 4 bars.
Hey presto - now I can finetune changes in each 4 bar section without having to play the damn thing from the beginning.

I’m sure there’s other smart tricks out there. But if anyone is a noob like me, this might be useful.

5

@Jeroen Turns out my #2 there absolutely kills performance. The framerate drops to a crawl and the Ebo process is steady at 112% (for some reason).

It’s still just 3 clips playing at the same time. Each track-clip use the same underlying video sample, the only thing that change is the Sample Start value. But when there’s a lot of copies of the same clip, performance drops. Is there any explanation to this that comes to mind?

I can share the project with you if needed, but it’s gonna be kinda large :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Hi Tobias, sorry to hear that. Let’s figure out what is happening. First I would like to know a bit more about your set-up. Can you send us the project with the videos so we can have a look? How big is it?

7

Hey @Jeroen It’s really cool that you want to look into it!

I’ve removed all but one of the video tracks, just kept the smallest video. I still have the issue. Here’s the project with assets:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dqpef3tt9ak4lb0/waterfalls%20ebo%20test%20Project.zip?dl=0

In the full projects I also have two other video tracks, as described in the OP. The framerate suffers more there, but not all that much, which is kinda surprising.

It seems like Ebo tries to instantiate all (many? some?) of the clips, don’t recognize them as clones, or something or the other.

I’m running this on the following rig:
MPB mid 2015
2,5 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB

Edit:
Here’s a link to a project folder with the full project, with two project files for side by side comparison

8

Thank you. We will look at the project. We might send you some more questions by email.

9

status: SOLVED
reason: a bug that slipped through beta testing :frowning:
solution: install EboSuite 1.33 (or later)