Greeting, forgive me if this question seems obvious, but I am fairly new to music-based software.
I want to be able to edit individual timelines for songs and save them separately, so that when I want to run a longer show, I can easily combine individual tracks in different orders. After reading the user manual, it mentioned that by setting a specific timecode to a specific song, you could get Liberation to switch timelines automatically, which would work perfectly for what I am trying to do.
My understanding was that, to achieve this, I would do the following:
For example, I would set the timecode on timeline 1 to 00:00:00 to represent the start of the timeline. Then, on timeline 2, I would set 00:00:10, expecting timeline 1 to switch to timeline 2 at the 10-second mark. However, when I do this, nothing happens and timeline 1 continues to play.
My question is: is there anything I am doing wrong that is preventing the timelines from changing automatically?
I’m sure Seb will be along in a moment, but I thought you had to have an SMPTE timecode generator to do this (eg timecodesync or possibly Ableton Live?) - and you’d have to ensure that they didn’t overlap.
Thank you for the advice. The way I understand it now is that the timecode itself needs to be different for each timeline, and the only way to change the timecode from the default 01:00:00:00 is by using one of the timecode-generating software programs you mentioned?
Sorry, I’ve not used the feature. I was simply assuming that one used a SMPTE timecode generator and when Liberation got the timestamp linked to a particular timeline, it would launch that timeline. But really it’s best to wait for @seb to explain it properly!
Hi Daniel! Yes this should work as you have it set up - I’m wondering if it’s not working right because your timelines are overlapping? Maybe try shortening each timeline to <10s and trying again?
@StonewolfActual has used this feature many times so it is in theory possible
To give some context we recently did a corporate event where we had 65 timelines, all synced to video where the lasers were mapped onto the video.
First thing, you need a valid incoming timecode signal. If you are on mac:
You can use ‘timecode expert’ and ‘loop back’ to achieve this if you dont have a DAW or external timecode Gen.
As a system check a basic 01:00:00:00 SMPTE 30fps nondrop. Select those things in Liberation and start the tinecode gen moving… that red box will turn green. Now you know Liberation has your TC.
Each timeline needs its own offset.
Most people usually use HOUR as their offset for each timeline. If you have more than 24 tracks, then you can do offsets at hour and 5 or 10 min intervals (ie. TL 1 is 01:01:00, TL2 is 01:05:00, etc.)
Then the ttimeline needs to be set to ON.
All timelimes must have a unique offset that doesnt overlap.
Thank you, Seb, for the help. As StonewolfActual advised, I downloaded Timecode Expert to use as a timecode generator. Since I am using Windows, I am using VB-Cable as a virtual cable between Timecode Expert and Liberation.
However, I am running into an issue where VB-Cable is being recognized by the Windows operating system, but Liberation is not recognizing VB-Cable in the Timecode window. I have been playing around with a bunch of different settings and have reinstalled both Liberation and VB-Cable a couple of times with no luck.
Do you have any ideas on how I could get Liberation to recognize VB-Cable?
