Making creative videos in Ableton Live

Before I explain, here is my latest video. An homage to the early days of the internet. I remember those days well..the good old 90’s.

Ableton for video?

   I’ve been using Ableton since about version 5. It has been at least four to five years now, and actually never tried using its video capabilities. Being a musician and interested more in audio, I never thought my DAW (Digital audio workstation) would be a tool to manipulate visual content along with my music. But as Ableton simplified so much of the audio editing and creation world, it also has things to offer on the visual side of things.

It’s a pretty simple process. You drag and drop videos from your computer into the timeline (Arrangement view only) and you could pretty much start editing them straight away. You use the tools that you know from Live’s audio, such as warping, time stretching and slicing. But when you slice the audio it also slices the video that goes with it.

Ableton live for video (screen shot from the project)

If you’re after a good tutorial here’s one I found on Youtube. It really helps.

 Limitations

As I mentioned above, video editing only works in arrangement view and so jamming around with videos or performing them live using the clip view is not an option at the moment. There are some plugins being developed and one of them is called Jam2 has been released and claims to solve that problem. From trying out the demo it seems a lot trickier than it sounds and full of bugs at the moment.

The future

I think Ableton should really develop the visual side of their amazing software and that could draw even more users than it already has. It would be awesome to be able to DJ with ableton and video at the same time. Certainly would be a game changer when that happens. Perhaps in Live 9?