Sync between touch and live drifting ?

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Hi,

I’m trying the bridge between touch and live, and the sync is not working so well, every couple of bars touch becomes quite late and then jump to be in sync again and then becomes to be late again and so on…

I’m using Live 8.2.8 and Touch 16900 on windows 7 x64.
I’m using the files in C:\Program Files (x86)\Derivative\TouchDesignerFTE.077\touch\Ableton, and tried the ones from the wiki page as well.
Anything to check ?

Thanks a lot!
Vincent

2

Hi Vincent
What are you reading the sync from in touch
I also notice this reading it from the transport bar and beat (not infront of touch at the minuite so i cant remeber where it tells you to loke on the wiki)
I just set up a midi chanel in live with c3 notes on the beat and then read my timing in from the midi in touch.
Seemed to be more stable/ accurate.

Let me know how you get on , It would be cool to try and get all the people using touch and live into one thread/ place to share some knowledge.
Dara

3

I’ve been working with the TD/Ableton sync for a few months now and they sync flawlessly both on the same computer and on separate computers. Where are you noticing TD going out of sync in the $OSC_TRANS? Are you using the same computer for both TD and Live? If not do you have any firewalls enabled and or a router with a firewall? Do you have any other network data interfering?

The sync comes in on the /local/abletonsync/oscmodule/syncin OSC chop maybe you need to adjust the min/max target and maximum queue parameters. Last summer I was sending data from Reactor to TD over OSC and found if I didn’t adjust these parameters I was losing packets.

Also the TD transport and the beat chops are not synced to Live. All sync data comes from the abletonsync comp in the root local folder via the $OSC_TRANS. (Just in case you were referring to the main timeline). I recently built an LFO comp that is driven by the $OSC_TRANS, it allows you two choose all the types of waveforms in the waveform chop along with most of its paramaters all synchronized with Live. I’ll post it in the comps forum if you want to check it out.

cheers
Keith

4

Hi,

Thanks for the replies.
I was looking at $OSC_TRANS, I’ve noticed the beat/tempo in Touch doesn’t get sync.
Just looking at the example scenes, the ones who have movies playing using $OSC_TRANS drift in and out of sync.

Thanks for the tips on the packets, maybe I need to change the settings on the chop. I’ll check tonight.
Live and touch are on the same computer and I am using localhost, I don’t have any firewall, just an external router, I guess it shouldn’t interfere.

@ Dara : Yes I tought about using a midi note on the beats from live, but how do you generate ramps from that ? I guess you can use the trigger chop, setting the attack length appropriately and decay/sustain to 0, but it would need to be done manually (unless it’s easy to have a setup to count the time between 2 notes ?)

Cheers
Vincent

5

Cool Thanks Keith
So i was wondering is there a way to pump an output from touch designer into ableton via max for live
I have a setup where i,m Running Touch designer on the projector and ableton on my screen and dont want to have to look up at the projector all the time.
Is there a way to have touchs video output on a small screen within live.
So live is driving tough designer and then i want the output of touch brought back in to live to view.
Hope this makes sense.

Dara
Ireland

6

Hey Dara,

Unfortunately there is no way to get TouchDesigner video back into Live. We used the standard tools available from Live and Max for Live to make this Ableton Sync component and don’t know of any way to feed video into Live. We’ve often had this same issue when doing live music shows and sometimes the easiest way to preview video to the projector is just to get a small external monitor like a 6" portable TV and place it on the desk beside you using a splitter to feed it the same signal as the beamer. A quick and dirty trick form the field…

7

I would also recommend some sort of splitter to a cheap monitor. No need to add complexity beyond that, especially on the road.
cod

8

Also make sure your root time in touch is set to match the Touch FPS frame rate setting on the ableton plugin. By default both should be set to 60.

J

9

Hi,

regarding my problem, in the end, just turning off the real time toggle at the top of the touch interface and then turning it back on fixes it.

Vincent

10

Does reducing the fps to 25 for example reduce the stain on the system .
The video clip i,m using is 25 fps and i,m happy with that frame rate.
Basically does reducing the frame rate reduce the load on the system once there the same in live and Touch.