Video with narrative and launching clips

[pfitzsimons]

I'm helping an artist with the music for their promotional video. The piece includes her speaking, with video from her studio and her travels. I've composed a tune in session view with several scenes. What I was hoping to do, to start the process of melding the two, was to play the video, launch the scenes at appropriate times, while recording into Arrangement view. The problem is, every time I launch a scene, the video's audio cuts out. Is there a way to override this feature in Ableton?

[jestermgee]

Been a while since I worked with video in Live but an idea is to use a tool to copy the audio out of the video and place it on a separate track then just mute the video's audio

[pfitzsimons]

Funny, that's exactly what I did! Well, basically.

You can just drop a video file into a track in session view and it converts it into an audio file automatically. Make sure the clip is not in one of your designated scenes and eliminate any stop buttons along that track so that when you trigger scenes it keeps playing. Meanwhile you have the actual video in a separate track in arrangement view. After you record your music to the video, you'll have to re-drop your video file to that track because it will record over it. Delete the track with the video's session view audio clip. Finally, to make the timeline match up with the music's tempo just drag everything to the start of the next measure and edit from there.