Ableton Forum

With the advent of Live 10, have there been any updates to the scoring side of it? For things like TV, Adverts etc, and film?

For example, can it now have a Frame based Grid? and can you nudge by frames like Logic, Protools, Reaper etc?

Or if you started Sound Design or composition in Ableton, is it the case that you'd have to finish and sync it all in another DAW against picture?

buckman wrote: Or if you started Sound Design or composition in Ableton, is it the case that you'd have to finish and sync it all in another DAW against picture?

That's probably the best option.

I have done a few SFX and scores for some indie films which I used Live 8/9 at the time and I found the workflow painful.

Live is great in many aspects but doing something like lots of fiddly little edits and having to move things by small ticks over multiple tracks in reference to video just took soooooo long. Then there is the issue of how Live handles video. I had the files sent in MOV format (which Live should handle) but it didn't so I had to re-encode again to MOV using different settings so it worked.

Where I had the big dramas was when I completed the mix but was then sent a new edit with some of the parts snipped so I had to move things all over the place and that is where the pain started.

I ended up basically getting my audio and tracks half way compiled, then exported and imported to Vegas and used the editor there to do the rest which was so much faster. If I ever need to start doing film work again I will be investing in something more designed for that work.

I've scored several films in Live 8 - 10. I don't think there are any specific improvements in Live 10 for this type of music, unless the group midi editing function helps you. I've used it for some string arrangement edits while looking at all of the sections at once.

I have asked Ableton a hundred times to just make the video window stay open all the time. It would help with scoring to picture so much.

i've done a ton of film and video game cinematic/trailer scoring with ableton - it's gotten easier but is still painful in certain ways(especially when it comes to working with a template). honestly even if they only added an FPS grid on the timeline and the ability to able to edit midi CC on the timeline(since OST music uses a ton of kontakt/CC1 for strings, etc) - even just those 2 features added would be a HUGE win for video+OST production with ableton. you'd think they'd improve this side of ableton already, considering that music videos are a massive part of being any kind of electronic musician these days. i'd hope one day - with computers as powerful as they are - for simple video mixing to also be an option(even if just two layers of video with simple opacity fading, that would be epic). then ableton could springboard to being used for vj stuff(god knows jitter is clunky and outdated with 0 gps support)... oh one can dream.

Echoing other comments. I have used Live for film (music, editing audio and sound design). But I know from my experiences that it definitely is not perfect and, sad to say because I do like the toolset in Live, I won't risk using it for my next movie project - especially if i have to import EDLs or whatever.

Really don't fancy using Pro Tools or Nuendo or any other DAW come to think of it, but hey.

Never mind the fact that I use windows and Live 10 video implementation is awful. So much so that I recently rewired Reaper to Live and the video playback integration was flawless.

Here is a 30 minute test video with click track to help debug sync problems with DAW video playback. Each frame of the video displays the performance time stamp (pts) of the frame in milliseconds. Compare the displayed time with the transport time shown in the DAW. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_8JnX ... WSAVreEX0e

Clever ! Thanks for sharing !

I always convert any video to photo-jpeg and ask for a timestamp printed on it.
With e.g 25fps video i set my tempo to 187.5 BPM with the grid set to 1/16th which gives me a 25fps grid if I'm doing sound editing. I never get any sync'ing problem.
Now if I start composing music within the same set I'm of course a bit f'cked up by this grid restriction, so I try to be organized and use different sets for every task when I'm not too much in a rush.