“Collapse Multicam” or Similar for XML Export to FCP

[Sean Morris]

Hi Ryan ~

I’m having the same issue with exporting multicams to a variety of different programs. Would love to find a way to “collapse” or “flatten” a multicam in Premiere Pro. Did you ever find a way to do this?

Thanks,
Sean

[Ryan Patch]

Nope, unfortunately it doesn’t exist. XML formats don’t support multicam (at least the way Premiere writes it) and there’s no “collapse”, unfortunately. I had to rebuild my timeline from scratch. Adobe seems committed to being interchangeable (as seen by their partnership with Automatic Duck,) so I’m hoping that in CS6 we’ll see a fix to this. Would be great to see it sooner, though!

Not being able to edit using multicam when I know I’ll have to pass the project to a colorist via XML is a HUGE drag.

My workaround has been to drop the multicam cut nested sequence into a duplicate of the source sequence, and then lining up the cuts so it was easy to duplicate it. Sucks, but it saves a bit of time.

God speed.

[Sean Morris]

Thanks Ryan, I will head over to the Adobe “Request a Feature” page and leave one now.

I found a temp way to get around this in After Effects. Since that program actually imports the entire nested sequence, you can delete the other shots in the multicam nest until just the shot you want remains. Of course this worked for me because there were just a couple of multicam shots I was affecting… if you needed to do an entire sequence it would be an insanely complicated and time consuming method.

Thanks again,
Sean

[Nicolas Duchon]

Actually there should be a way to easily obtain a “collapsed” XML from a PP CS6 Multicam XML, as all the needed information is already there and -almost- correctly ordered. Each muticam sequence <clipitem> points to a <sequence> wich in turns points to another <clipitem> which then point to the correct <file>, but it seems that no XML reading application is able to decypher this nested hierarchy. The first <clipitem> does not have the correct <masterclipid>, <name> and <duration> but those are found either in the second <clipitem> or in the subsequent <file>. So again everything is there, just written in the wrong way.

I was able to turn a very simple (3 camera angles, 6 edits, no audio) multicam XML into a “collapsed” XML by manually copying, pasting, moving and erasing values from the XML. So it works but it’s obviously impossible to use for a real world project. Re-editing again as Ryan did would be hundreds of time faster than manually editing an XML file.

There is probably a way to make it automatic but this is way beyond my knowledge.