Comments on: The best codec for video in Ableton Live on a Mac.

By: Oliver Chesler

Oliver Chesler — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:48:21 +0000

Thank you for confirming my novice testing! Although this post is older I still am using motion jpeg.

By: dub

dub — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:50:33 +0000

H.264 is a great compression for straight playback in something like Qlab or Quicktime, but for use in an app that can tweak the playback like ableton or Isadora then its got to be photoJPEG all the way. It doesn’t use keyframes, so you can pause it anywhere or scrub it backwards and forwards without using excessive CPU to calculate what’s going on. The only way to use H.264 and similar codecs is to set them to keyframe every frame – which is pretty pointless. I use MPEG Streamclip to optimize video. it’s free, fast and works well.

By: lematt

lematt — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:35:15 +0000

Thank you very much for that post. I’ve just been through 3 days of nightmare while making sound design over some videos in Ableton. Now i now i just have to convert my video into a CPU lighter format so i can work more easily !

By: jason skidmore

jason skidmore — Sat, 14 May 2011 03:14:46 +0000

what’s the best quicktime plug in for window 7??

By: Marco Raaphorst

Marco Raaphorst — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 10:02:19 +0000

one important thing about Photo – JPEG: it’s frame accurate, so when you stop the music, the exact frame is shown. most composers use Photo JPEG because of this.

By: sp_key

sp_key — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:46:19 +0000

@ Neuronaut

A ‘creative’ way to do lossless video is to use MPEG-2 ‘I-Frame Only’ at very high bitrate.

I do not know if Ableton can render videos in MPEG-2 but if it does then edit the parameters that allow you to access the GOP Structure and select I Frames only (no P and B frames). If your render is say around 25Mbps of I Frames only then this is nearly lossless.

By: Oliver Chesler

Oliver Chesler — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:40:35 +0000

So far everything I tested or read about leads me to photo jpeg as the best choice.

By: lagowski

lagowski — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:34:55 +0000

You could use DV as ‘none’ would create a HUGE file!
BTW: H.264 is very CPU intensive because there is a large amount going on when the video is encoded and decoded; I,P and B frames, slices, motion vectors, error correction, entropy encoding, variable macroblocks etc etc.

By: Neuronaut

Neuronaut — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:09:31 +0000

What about during composition? Can anyone suggest a good codec for lossless video? I tried None as a codec and it failed to export from live.

By: Kent Sandvik

Kent Sandvik — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:13:37 +0000

If you play back a lot of animation movies, the animation codec works well and is light on the CPU. I was surprised H.264 was expensive, would think that codec is optimized to the N:th degree. Note that a lot of how the playback works is reflected when you encode the movie itself. You could make it play really slow and take a lot of CPU cycles if you make the quality parameters very high. –Kent