Recording live input
Play a knob, slider, or controller and DNA bakes your moves straight onto a parameter as keyframes — then refine them by hand.
Sometimes the fastest way to animate something is to perform it. Grab a MIDI knob (or an OSC message, a phone, anything DNA can hear), hit play, and twist. DNA captures the live values as you go and turns them into a real keyframe curve you can clean up afterwards. It's motion capture for a single parameter.
How it works
Recording happens through the Recorder. You point it at a target parameter, tell it which live input to listen to, arm it, and play.
Connect a live input. Anything DNA receives — MIDI, OSC, a gamepad, a network message — can drive the recording. See Live performance for getting devices talking to DNA.
Choose the target parameter you want to drive (for example a node's radius or a colour's brightness).
Arm the Recorder and press play. As the value comes in, DNA samples it frame by frame.
Stop to bake. The captured samples become keyframes on that parameter, sitting on the timeline like any hand-drawn animation.
Do a couple of practice passes before you commit. Because the result is plain keyframes, re-recording simply lays down a fresh take you can compare or discard.
Keeping the curve clean
A live performance produces a lot of samples — potentially one per frame. The Recorder can thin those down to a smooth, editable curve instead of a dense wall of points.
Smoothing tolerance — a higher tolerance keeps fewer keyframes that still follow your performance closely; a lower one keeps more detail. This is the difference between a tidy handful of editable keys and an exact-but-unwieldy trace.
Handle style — newly baked keyframes can land with smooth (Auto) handles so the curve flows naturally between your moves, ready to tweak.
Refining after the take
Once the take is baked, nothing is locked. The keyframes are ordinary keyframes:
Open the Curve Editor to reshape the motion, drag handles, or delete the overshoot you didn't mean.
Nudge timing on the timeline.
Re-record a section and blend it with what you already have.
This is the real payoff of recording rather than live-driving: a performance you can edit, not just replay.
Recording bakes a performance into keyframes. If instead you want a parameter to follow a controller live every time you run the project (no baking), that's a live binding — see Live performance.
Recorded vs. live vs. expressions
DNA gives a parameter its value from a few sources, in order: a wired connection, an expression, keyframes, then its base value. Recording writes into the keyframe layer, so:
A recorded take behaves exactly like animation you drew by hand.
An expression like
= sin($T * 2)will still win over keyframes if one is set — so clear it before recording if you want your performance to show.For procedural, math-driven motion reach for an expression; for a feel you perform, record it.