Best way to edit this scene with FCP X?

[Tom Wolsky]

Don’t. Use FCP7.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Mark Suszko]

Failing Tom’s suggestion, which I agree with, ignore the b-roll for now. Concentrate on layering each take by synching the audio. Before we had multicam, what we did was line up tracks in a stack, most-used camera on top to least-used on the bottom. We used the razor tool to slice thru all the tracks at each cut point (we ran a realtime playback pass first and just tapped the key to create a marker at each cut point we wanted, then arrow-forward, razor, arrow forward, went pretty fast.)

Then you went thru the tracks again, using control-x to delete the segments you didn’t want on the top track, revealing the track below. If you didn’t want that angle either, you’d delete that selection as well, until yo uncovered the shot you wanted. Now, I don’t know if the magnetic timeline support that, I don;t own x yet (or a machine powerful enough to run it on).

Using this method, it helps speed things along to put your most-used camera up high in the stack. With that many angles to work with, I think I’d do one whole pass of just the actor’s best tracks, collapse that to a master track, then do the same for all the stand-in dancer’s best tracks, thus generating two submaster tracks, and I’d do my final pass with those two mater tracks, and then a final pass to insert b-roll to cover and enhances.

If your audio is the same in each track, the automatic synching feature of x might be helpful for this.

[Bill Marcellus]

Mark,

Thanks for the input. That’s exactly how I would do it in FCP 7.

The thing that has me stumped right now is that all of the camera runs are not complete takes of the song. In other words, some of them start in the middle of the song, etc. And the actor lip syncs at different times in each take.

So I need to manually sync all of the takes to the final music track and I’m not sure how to do that in FCP X.

Bill

[Jeremy Garchow]

I haven’t checked out fcpx yet, but from what I can gather, you would probably make a gap clip the length of your song, and pair the audio to the gap clip. You can add the video layers above it and slide them around.

Don’t know if that will work or not.

[Misha Aranyshev]

[Mark Suszko] “We used the razor tool to slice thru all the tracks at each cut point (we ran a realtime playback pass first and just tapped the key to create a marker at each cut point we wanted, then arrow-forward, razor, arrow forward, went pretty fast.)”

It is for the sins like these gods unleashed the magnetic timeline and no viewer upon us. Razor blade is Control-V in FCP and it works during playback. It even puts temporary markers on timeline for visual feedback and keeps them there until you hit stop.

[Jean-françois Robichaud]

No need for a gap clip. You can simply lay down the song audio in the timeline as your main storyline. Then add all video clips to be connected to it.

But that won’t help with sync. According to the manual, you will do this: Select all videos AND song audio in the Event Browser. Select Clip>Synchronize Clips. This will create a compound clip with all of your elements synced together. In theory at least. I don’t know if this feature can handle 32+ clips. I haven’t tried it. If it works, then you’ll have a timeline in which you can reorder your connected clips up and down for visibility, and trim them as you wish.

I think I’m actually going to test this functionality now.

[Geoff Dills]

My experience syncing clips is you can only sync one video with secondary audio at a time.

Best,
Geoff

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Geoff Dills] “My experience syncing clips is you can only sync one video with secondary audio at a time.”

Exactly, hence the need for the gap clip, as you can’t have an empty space in your timeline. The gap clip would allow you to drag clip above them (where you can have empty space). Maybe I’m wrong.

[Jean-françois Robichaud]

Actually I just ran a test on a music video, syncing roughly 30 video clips + an audio track, in a single operation. It works. I’ll write a new post with the details shortly.

[Jean-françois Robichaud]

Ok, I just ran a test with a music video and it works… mostly. Here’s what you must do:
– In the Event Browser, select all of your clips, as well as the music audio.
– Right-Click and choose Synchronize Clips.
– This will create a compound clip with all clips synchronized.

As long as your video clips have got a clear audio of the music, it should work. If not, you’ll have to do manual syncing.

I just executed a test of this syncing process. For this, I downloaded the music video for Video Killed the Radio Star. Then I cut it up in about 30 different pieces of overlapping video, some representing a single shot of at most a few seconds, some 20 seconds long or more. I’m trying to simulate your particular situation here.

The syncing process:
– I imported all of this footage in a new event in FCP X.
– I selected all the clips (including a standalone audio version) in the Event Browser
– I choose “Synchronize Clips” from the right-click menu
– Automatically a new compound clip appeared in the Event Browser and the syncing process was launched in the background

Results:
– You need to wait for the background syncing process to finish before you open the Compound Clip with synced footage. Opening it too early, and all the clips start at frame zero. Just reopen it from the Event Browser once the BG syncing is completed and it should be fine.
– All clips were successfully synchronised to each other and to the audio clip… almost

ISSUES:
Unfortunately, there was an issue with frame rate. The clips have a 29.97 timebase, but FCP X created a compound clip with a 23.98 timebase. This led to most clips having a subframe offset with the reference. I thought this was because I hadn’t told FCP X what my project’s frame rate was supposed to be, so I restarted after dropping clip in the project timeline, making FCP X switch the project to 29.97 (FCP X uses info from the first clip to determine frame rate). Then I resynced all the clips: same problem. Then I thought, the Event is independent from the Project, so changing the project framerate isn’t going to affect what I do in the Event Browser. So how to I tell FCP X explicitely what frame rate to use for the syncing process? Shouldn’t this be implicit from the clips all being at 29.97? Unless I’m missing something, this is a bug.

Also, I kind of cheated: in addition to the audio clip and all of the short video clips, I had a video clip that spanned the whole music video. FCP X inserted that long clip in the main storyline of the synced compound clip and connected everything else to it (including the audio clip).

If I repeat the syncing process without this full video clip (so just audio and short clips), FCP X doesn’t sync things properly. It’s a repetitive song, so it still makes matches, but they’re the wrong ones.

Here’s my theory: FCP X will only use a VIDEO clip as basis for syncing other clips. If you don’t have a video clip that spans the whole song (or at least sufficient overlaps), then FCP X might not sync properly. In my case, some of my short clips do have overlaps, but maybe they’re not sufficient for FCP X’s algorithm. FCP X should have used the audio clip as a basis to sync all the short video clips, but it failed to do that. So I guess this is a bug too.

More on this later.