Hi There,
I have purchased the full Videosync 2 software and am just starting to figure it out a little. I am new so this might be a stupid question or one thats already been answered (though i couldn’t find it) but I have the Squares instrument reacting to some drum midi notes that are playing. I already know how to use some effects like CROP MAP and TRANSFORM to make it a little more interesting. But now for my question:
How would i go about giving the different squares their own unique color?
Do i seperate them all individually and then give them seperate COLORIZE effects or something? I also found ‘COLORCONTROL’ in an old video but can’t find that in Videosync 2. Am i missing something or are those features found in a different/newer effect?
Would love any sort of help/ideas on this. Thanks a lot! 
Greetings,
Teun
Hi Teun, welcome to the forum!
First of all, there are no stupid questions . The Squares instrument is quite basic, as it simply generates white squares/rectangles that fade out. Its true power becomes more apparent when blending the output of the track with another track. There isn’t a simple button (yet) to color the squares, but we can blend the white squares with another track that does contain color. I attached a Live Set below that demonstrates this in a basic way.
Squares Blend Project (Live 11).zip (33.9 KB)
- Track 1 contains Squares, which draws a grid of 16 rectangles. When triggering any of the 16 notes, the envelope makes the respective rectangles fade out over a short amount of time. In other words, considering we are working with the color white, the rectangles at first are at 100% brightness, and then fade out to 0%.
- Track 2 contains the Gradient device with its Feather set to 0. This device creates two color planes; yellow on the left half of the screen and blue on the right half of the screen. The Properties device next to it controls the Blend Mode for this track (and thus how it’s blended with Track 1). The Blend Mode is set to Multiply, which means that the brightness levels of pixels of Track 1 are multiplied with the pixels of Track 2. As I mentioned earlier, a fully white square equals to 100%, grey for example to 50%, and black to 0%. By multiplying these values with the pixels of Track 2, we determine the brightness of the colors of Track 2.
- In this case I used the Gradient device to create two colors, but you could for example use a video clip (or an image with various color planes and load it into Videosync Simpler) to blend with Squares’ generated rectangles instead.
- Deactivating the Properties device will give the same result as setting its Blend Mode to Additive (which is the default blend mode for all tracks).
ColorControl was a device from Videosync 1.x, Colorize is its successor and was introduced with Videosync 2.0.
Colorize recolors pixels based on the brightness levels (0-100%) of pixels of the video input. The brightness range is divided into two/three ranges: by default dark is 0-33%, mid 33% to 66%, and bright 66% to 100%. You can move the mid point to change these ranges and thus how pixels within each ranges are mapped to the two/three new colors.
Hey JP, thanks so much for that very detailed and fast answer! I’m excited to and try that way out. I am sadly still on Ableton Live Suite 11 and your demo project is for Live 12. I would upgrade, but don’t really need to right now and is a little pricy.
Is there any easy way to change it to a Live 11 version? Otherwise i am just gonna see if i can get the same result using the subcription you’ve provided here.
Thanks a lot already!
No problem! I have updated the Live Set in my original reply.
Oh great, very thoughtful, thank you! I do see how important the properties plugin is. I managed to get it to work like you said by importing an image with the different colors into a video simpler. Now alls i gotta do is figure out how to get the still image to just keep looping in the simpler without retriggering everytime, but i’ll probably be able to figure that out by looking at the videosimpler part in the manual. Thanks again!