Live performance
Cameras, network video, microphones and controllers wired into a graph that cooks every frame.
The live model
Every live setup is the same loop, repeating in real time: external source → your graph → output.
An external source feeds fresh data into the graph on every frame. Your nodes process it, warp it, react to it or drive parameters with it, and the result goes to the viewport, a projector, the network, or back out to hardware.
Adding a live input makes that node and everything downstream of it cook every frame instead of only on edit. Nothing global switches: the behaviour is per node, and each node's cook indicator can be clicked to override it, so setting a live source to S opts it out of cooking every frame and F freezes its last result. Continuous cooking costs performance, so watch the The performance panel when several inputs run at once.
What you can plug in
Controllers and protocols: MIDI, OSC, DMX over Art-Net and sACN, Serial, WebSocket, MQTT and Ableton Link. Four of these are not connected to a device yet; Inputs says which.
Live video: NDI network video, cameras and capture cards, IP cameras, Syphon on macOS, screen capture on macOS, and a browser source that renders live HTML. See Camera Input, NDI Input and Screen Capture.
Sensors and devices: gamepads, keyboard and pointer state, and a File IO node that both watches a file for changes and renames, copies, deletes or writes files on a trigger. See Pointer and File IO.
Audio arrives through Audio Input, which carries its own spectrum and band levels. Synthesising and shaping sound inside the graph is covered in Audio. Camera-driven body tracking, depth, object detection and optical flow are covered in Vision & ML.
Picking and configuring a source is covered in Inputs.
Sending results back out
Video, sound and control data all go back out. NDI sends your output to other machines and applications, and Syphon shares frames with another app on the same Mac. MIDI and OSC send control data to instruments, lighting desks and other software; see MIDI Output and OSC Output. DMX fixtures and LED installations are driven over Art-Net or sACN. Audio leaves through Audio Output.
Outputs has the detail.
Driving parameters with live data
The intended route is the parameter bridge: pin a parameter, map a MIDI CC or OSC message to it, and a physical fader controls anything in the project. That layer is not connected, so today a controller reaches a parameter by wiring an input node's output into the parameter's pin. See The parameter bridge and The Parameters panel & hotbar.
Beat-locked motion is covered in Tempo sync and Clocks & tempo.
A worked chain
NDI Input receives video from another machine on the network.
A Warp node bends and distorts that video. Its corner grid is dragged with the Warp tool in the viewport.
A Pointer node's position drives the Warp node's
strength, so the effect comes and goes under the cursor.NDI Output sends the finished image back out over the network.
The browser gets the camera and almost nothing else. A Camera node is real in a web export: the page asks for the webcam, and the live frame lands on the graph as an ordinary image, device list included. Every other live source is desktop-only, and a web build now says so rather than quietly reading zero: MIDI, OSC, DMX, gamepad, pointer, WebSocket, NDI, Syphon, screen capture and audio in or out report that they are not implemented for the browser, and the node cooks with an error rather than a plausible value. The Web Player is for sharing finished pieces. See Web export and The player.
Syphon GPU texture sharing and screen capture are macOS-only. NDI and Syphon are not wired into the export workflow as export targets: the target types exist but no backend implements them. Use the live input and output nodes above for real-time work.