Our band is using Ableton and a third-party setlist plugin to play our HD tracks and click during our live show. Our Ableton liveset has to be played in arrangement view. I’m going to have Videosync 2 running on one of the tracks and HDMI outputted to video screens behind our band. The plan is to have a live camera with some light VFX on only about three songs in the whole 15 song set.
I’m having hard time to figure out a best practice for displaying our backdrop image on other songs when the live camera won’t be active. Only way I have figured out for now is to have super long video files to fill the whole session. However, it doesn’t seem resource effective and has also a couple of other issues: it’s very hard to change the backdrop quickly because it requires new video files to be copied all over the session, it can be messy with tempo changes and different length song files.
TLDR: what’s the best way to display a backdrop image from the Videosync 2 output feed when I’m not displaying a live video
If you’re only looking to show an image (no moving video) as the backdrop, then you can simply drop the image file into a Video Simpler. Then, make a MIDI clip of for example 1 bar with a single C3 note of 1 bar, and loop that clip throughout your Live Set.
Having said that, we are working on a new device that will make it a bit easier to work with images.
Onto your live camera feed: you will need a second track for this. Make sure to place this track underneath the track containing the Video Simpler, or in other words, make sure that the live camera track has a higher index number. Place the External In on this track and select your camera input. You will notice that the camera feed is blended with the backdrop image. This as expected, as the default blend mode is Additive. Add a Properties device on the External In track, and set the Blend Mode to Alpha. The External In track is now drawn on top of the backdrop, and you can use the mixer’s volume slider to control the opacity (0dB being 100% opaque). To hide the camera feed, simply automate either the volume slider or the track’s Mute toggle.