90-minute Presentations Multicam

[Greg Ball]

FYI it took 4 hours for the first sync.

Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com

[Michael Hancock]

How did you sync? Did you let it auto sync by audio? If so, I’d be curious if it would be faster to find a sync point and sync by markers, or if it still does some audio analysis for syncing in the background.

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Michael Hancock
Editor

[Greg Ball]

Hi Michael,

Yes I highlighted each clip in the browser and told it to make a multi clip. There are long presentations, so it would be easier to just let them sync instead of creating markers. That’s especially true with the PowerPoint slides that also have audio.

I’m not sure if it’s still doing audio analysis in the background.

Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com

[Michael Hancock]

That would make sense that it took a while if it was analyzing all the audio for syncing. but 4 hours is a long while. I would have given up after 15 minutes!

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Michael Hancock
Editor

[Greg Ball]

So this is normal? I have about 30 of these presentations to edit. Giving up is not an option. Any other advice?

Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com

[Michael Hancock]

I have no idea if it’s normal. I’ve never done a multicam with clips that long. If you have a few cameras that are each the full 90 minutes, you might manually sync those first since that would probably be faster. Then open the multicam and add all the powerpoint files with audio and let it do the audio sync for those. That way it’s not processing and analysing the audio for so many super long clips.

Maybe Jeremy Garchow will chime in – he’s a smart dude who knows the software really well, and I think he’s done a fair bit of multicam. He might be able to shed some light on it.

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Michael Hancock
Editor

[Greg Ball]

Hi Michael, When you say “manually sync those first since that would probably be faster. Then open the multicam and add all the powerpoint files with audio and let it do the audio sync for those.” I’m not sure what you mean.

Can you explain that to me step by step?

Would I first sync the 2 videos files? Cam1 and Cam2? then sync the PowerPoint footage (which really acts as camera 3) to that multiclip created with the Cam 1 & 2 Multicam?

Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com

[Michael Hancock]

I’ll try to explain it from memory – I’m actually on Premiere Pro now and haven’t worked in FCPX in a few months, so I don’t have an ability to actually open the software to make sure I’m giving you 100% accurate step-by-step info.

I’m assuming the wide and tight cameras are all one clip – that is, the cameras started rolling at the beginning of the presentation and shut off at the end.

If they are, scrub into them a bit and look for a decent sync point between them and set a marker on that point for each camera. This is what I’m calling a manual sync. Then select the wide and tight and make a multicam clip and choose to sync by the marker. This should very quickly create a multicam clip that you can scrub through to check sync. If it’s off by just a bit, right click the multicam and choose to open in angle editor (or something like that) and nudge one of the cameras left/right as necessary to get them in sync.

I recommend doing this because it should be faster than having FCPX analyse all 90 minutes of audio and sync it for you after 4 hours, assuming the wide and tight shots are one clip each.

Once you have the wide and tight synced, open the multicam clip and do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQy1s4-Nyy0

Basically, add an angle, drop in your powerpoint footage, and sync it to the the wide or tight. You can sync it by audio here, if the powerpoint slides are a bunch of clips. If the Atomos recording is one long clip you could manually sync it to, which might be even faster.

I’d say it’s worth a shot trying it just to see if it’s faster, although it does mean more manual work for you.

Also, you asked if there was any issue with renaming clips in the browser. Short answer, no. It’s just metadata. But I prefer to add custom names in the Comment column or Scene/Take so that I always have the original clip name to reference, in case I need it.

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Michael Hancock
Editor

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[Greg Ball]

Perfect! Thank you so much. This should be much faster!

Have a great weekend.

Greg Ball, President
Ball Media Innovations, Inc.
https://www.ballmediainnovations.com

[Michael Hancock]

Hope it helps! Let me know if it does.

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Michael Hancock
Editor