Help with Live 11 and 10 crashing/hanging when working with long video track

[therealthing89]

Hi! Looking for some help here, as I haven't received a response from my June 11th support ticket yet.

I'm having serious issues with Live 11 Suite (11.3.3) and Live 10 Standard (10.1.43) when I'm trying to open my large Set that I last edited in Live 10 Standard on another computer.

My 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max (Ventura) is unable to successfully open my large Set that I run on 2015 and 2019 MacBooks (Big Sur) on stage. I'm able to open and edit the Set on those two show computers, but not on my personal computer (2021): after loading but before I can do anything, the spinning color wheel won't stop, leaving me with no option but to force quit the app.

I added the affected projects to my "Places" in the sidebar, navigated to the .als file, and attempted to drag a few tracks into the Arrangement view. I had no trouble until I tried dragging in my "Prompter" track, which only contains warped video files (that contain some audio). (The "Prompter" track is used for syncing lyric video to other tracks' content.) This led to the app hanging.

When I load a version of the Set that does NOT include the "Prompter" track, Live 11 and 10 don't crash and everything works normally.

I'm unsure of why I can load/edit/play these Sets on my two older (Intel processor) MacBook Pros but not on my newer/better-spec'ed 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro.

This Set is very large (long timeline), with hundreds of songs that load up instantly on stage as needed for seamless playback with my band. Over the past few days, I've been testing this problem using ONLY the "Prompter" track. If I delete roughly the entire second half of that track's content, Live 11 and 10 don't crash and everything works normally. I tried working backwards from there to see if there was a specific failure point, but so far, I get different results each time (ex. deleting 40% of the remaining content vs. deleting 30% of the remaining content), so it doesn't appear to be one specific video file causing this issue.

Thanks so much for any tips or suggestions.

[chapelier fou]

Have you checked how much RAM is used by the set ?

[therealthing89]

I did; here's what I found using Activity Monitor on my Mac (physical memory: 32 GB).

When I open Live 11 Suite with no Set loaded: 590.9 MB (overall system memory used: 17.12 GB)
When I attempt to load one of my test Sets (only track being the "Prompter" video track, with the entire timeline pretty much cut in half), Live stops responding at 698.4 MB (overall system memory used: 17.32 GB)

When I open Live 10 Standard with no Set loaded: 508.8 MB (overall system memory used: 17.10 GB)
When I attempt to load one of my test Sets (only track being the "Prompter" video track, with the entire timeline pretty much cut in half), Live stops responding at 644.1 MB (overall system memory used: 17.27 GB)

I do realize that there are other processes running on my Mac when opening both versions of Live in this test, but as you see from the physical memory/overall system memory used, there should be plenty of headroom here...

[therealthing89]

Just checking back in to see if anyone has experienced this or if anyone has tips on how to reach Ableton. I haven't heard anything on my support ticket yet.

[Tarekith]

Unfortunately support is super backed up at the moment, so they are taking longer than usual to reply to tickets.

[[jur]]

What's your video file's format?

[bakku]

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... with-Video

[therealthing89]

Unfortunately support is super backed up at the moment, so they are taking longer than usual to reply to tickets.

Thanks so much for the heads up, I appreciate it!

[therealthing89]

What's your video file's format?

The video files are MP4 (MPEG-4 AAC, H.264).

[therealthing89]

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... with-Video

Thanks for posting this link; I've gone through it multiple times without any luck, unfortunately.

[bakku]

What's your video file's format?

The video files are MP4 (MPEG-4 AAC, H.264).

you should use Photo-Jpeg codec, if you working with big video files.

[[jur]]

you should use Photo-Jpeg codec, if you working with big video files.

+ 1000
And I'll add: you should NEVER use .mp4. I don't know why it's recommended in certain articles, it's just never worked properly with Live, and it can't sync correctly anyway.

[agamben]

Ableton + Video = Bad

[therealthing89]

What's your video file's format?

The video files are MP4 (MPEG-4 AAC, H.264).

you should use Photo-Jpeg codec, if you working with big video files.

Thanks for the tip; I'll keep that in mind as I add files to the project.
The video files I'm importing are around 10MB or less (prompter lyric videos that are warped to sync with the playback audio)- but there are hundreds of them already imported & synced. The most frustrating thing here is that the Set opens fine on my Intel '15 and '19 MBPs- import, edit, playback, etc. all function totally fine. It's just my M1 Max '21 MBP that hangs...

[therealthing89]

you should use Photo-Jpeg codec, if you working with big video files.

+ 1000
And I'll add: you should NEVER use .mp4. I don't know why it's recommended in certain articles, it's just never worked properly with Live, and it can't sync correctly anyway.

That's interesting. I specifically encoded these videos that way based on those recommendations, go figure I will say that I haven't personally had any issues with syncing these .mp4s with the playback audio, but I'm warping them and only using them internally (on-stage lyric prompter), so I may not be noticing any small syncing discrepancies. Thanks for your help.