I’ve create video to accompany an 11 minute piece designed for live performance. While the process in live performance occurs in session view, in order to create a YouTube record of the piece I captured the session view activity in performance view. No problems.
When I attempted to export the piece so I could upload it to YouTube, however, problems emerged, slightly different with each attempt. Often the audio didn’t begin for a few seconds, then, when it came in seemed to be in sync. But always, at some point, usually around the 2nd or 3rd minute in, the video image contracted to about 40-60 percent of full screen size and jumped toward the lower righthand corner. From there on the video was never full screen and jumped around–sometimes upper lefthand corner, sometimes centered, sometimes lower righthand corner. Have you been able to export without this problem? If so, were you Ableton 10 or 11? I’m using 11 and wonder if that’s related to the problem.
Hi Patrick; I’ve read your email you sent earlier as well, and think it’s best if I answer your questions here.
Just for general clarification; by exporting you mean you’re actually recording Videosync’s output with Syphon Recorder, correct? Exporting video through Live (how you normally would without Videosync), is not compatible with anything created with Videosync.
I do not think using Live 10 or Live 11 will make any difference, simply because Live does not have anything to do with video processing. This is all done by Videosync, while Live merely functions as its user interface.
Depending on what settings I use for recording with Syphon Recorder, the results may vary. From personal experience I can say that Syphon Recorder’s output can be a bit glitchy, but this goes hand in hand with the amount of stress your computer is going through. As is mentioned in other topics on this forum, playing back audio, video, and recording both at full resolution all at the same time can be a lot to handle. I’m curious if the results you’ve had so far will improve if you lower the draw size and/or frame rate of Videosync. You can set this in the Control Window (CMD+K). A lower draw size and frame rate will mean less pixels will be calculated and recorded, thus lowering the workload across the board.
Regarding desync of audio and video; I’ve had to deal with this as well in some cases using Syphon Recorder. When this would occur; I would record the audio output of Live into a different application, and then stitch the audio and video recordings together in a video-editing app like Premiere Pro.
Let me know if any of this helps.
I’m also struggling with the video export. if I use syphon recorder or any other screen recorder, I always record a couple more seconds than the actual audio, because I need to press record first and then press play on Ableton. is there a way to do this simultaneously? Then I have to trim the video and manually match it with the audio, which is far from ideal. I’m currently working on a project that starts with a black video and only audio, so I don’t have any exact start reference for the video. It’s been a nightmare to try to do the matching by hand, and when the content is reacting to the audio, if it’s a few ms off it’s very noticeable. How do you handle this? Thanks
What I did was to use a long countoff, 16 beats, with the click good and loud and then hit siphon record on the 17th beat.
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that’s a nice tip! thanks, I’ll try that. With syphon, I’m constantly getting audio dropouts, glitches, and distortion no matter what settings I use when recording the audio through it. So in the meantime, what I’ve done was screen recording with QuickTime, set up a virtual device as a microphone, so it catches the internal output of my mac, and everything gets synced perfectly when exporting. zero glitches. I just need to trim the first few seconds of the recording but that’s pretty easy to do since audio and video are already in sync.
What could help in addition to this is using Squares and MIDI notes on every beat during the count off, so you have visual and audio cues that you can then align in post.
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Hey, thought I’d chime in on this even though it’s old. Syphon Recorder can record audio too, so no need to record/export the audio separately. I set my Ableton output to Blackhole, a free virtual audio device that replaced Soundflower on newer Macs, and set that as the audio input on Syphon Recorder. If you need to hear the output as you record, I use Audio Hijack to set up a Blackhole → Audio output device chain. After recording in Syphon Recorder the only additional step is to trim the video, which you can do with Cmd+T in Quicktime player. Hope this helps!
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