Hey,
I was a HUGE Ableton user (I worked on Metal Gear Solid V in Live) so its definitely possible.....it just doesn't make your life easy.
If you work primarily in musical sound design or hybrid music you will get a lot more from live but if you ever want to stray into orchestral mockups and 5.1 you are shit out of luck. It lacks even simple things like editing multiple midi clips at once (so if you have a section with 50 midi tracks stacked, you are gunna have to move those notes 50 fucking times xD)
If you want to score movies I really recommend trying something like Cubase, Logic, DP... something with great midi editing functions, score editors, dedicated mixing windows, 5.1 support etc. All of these things need workarounds in Ableton Live and you just have to ask yourself the question I did, is it worth the wasted time.
Cubase for me was the obvious choice because it was already up to a high standard in terms of the way I work with audio and it also had a function to create custom key commands, so I was able to change cubase commands to the ones I prefer from Ableton Live. It almost felt like Live sometimes xD
I see some people above pointing to all of the people who successfully use Live for movies, but from my own personal experience I wouldn't even want to anymore, I would waste so much time doing pointless shit that is just made easy for me in a DAW designed for writing music first and formost. If you look at ableton lives updates and new features, film composers are clearly not a focus.
So yeah you can stick to live if you want but trust me if you want to get into orchestral shit, the grass is most certainly greener on the otherside.... be that DP, Cubase, Logic. And just because someone has made it work doesn't mean it made their lives easy, just that they worked around its shortcomings and no doubt wasted a lot of time doing so. At least in my experience.
-DJ
Yes, and I’d add that it’s not just the work involved and the time saved, but functionality like ability to select and navigate multiple clips in Logic (for instance) let’s you visualize and think about what your composing in ways that I found very hard to get my head around in Live, much as I love it, and as much as I’d love Logic to have something comparable to the clip view.
live 10 offers improvements in midi workflow to be sure, which I hope will continue, but not nearly enough to go back yet.