Editing short cut

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

Syncing all of your video takes on separate layers is a preferred way to edit these kinds of things if you don’t have FCP 5. (FCP 5 has built-in multi-camera editing.)

You can just stop playback at each point you want (need) a cut and click thru each of your angles, picking the one that best-fits the mood.

OR… You can “shrink” each of the video tracks (with “Scale” in the Motion Tab) and position each so that ALL tracks are visible (though small) at the same time. Depending on your system (and the number or tracks) you may need to render this temporary “split-screen” so that it will play in real-time.

This will make fast work of your cut decisions.
Each time you decide which of the shots you want in the final edit, slice it (razor blade) on both ends, and “shift-drag” (won’t slip) it up to a new, TOP video track (which will be ultimately be your “final” track.)
After you are finished making cut decisions, select ALL the clips on this TOP track and “Remove Attributes” so all the video will snap back to full size and normal position.

[Trevor Ward]

Good trick Matte. I have one thing to add. I’m working on an instruction with 2 cameras. I suggest keeping your “main” camera on V2. the second camera below. And then sync them. Then, only put the cut clips on V3. This way you always have the orginal sync’d clips available. So V1 is camera 2, in full. V2 is camera 1 in full. V3 is camera 1 cut-aways.

[Max Frank]

Hi,

If you don’t want to upgrade to FCP 5 – Digital Heaven has a multi-cam software package that I believe is reasonably priced and works well.

Wayne

[Gary Hughes]

I just edited a 5 camera show, plus a line cut. I haven’t had time to learn the multiclip stuff yet, so here’s what I did.

I don’t use the line cut, but I did put it on track 6 (for whatever reason), and disabled the track. You can disable/enable by control clicking and toggle the check by enable, or you can select a clip and type control+B on the keyboard. Cameras 1-5 were put on tracks 1-5.

After getting all the cameras in sync (via timecode in my case), I turned on autoselect for the 5 tracks, and turned it off for everything else. This allows me to cut via keyboard shortcut, and only cut the autoselected tracks.

Locate the position where you want to switch to a different camera. With the playhead there, and with no clips selected, type control+V to cut all clips. Then one at a time, starting at the topmost track, click on a clip that you don’t want to see and type control+B to disable it. Keep going down till you see the one that you do want. Move to the next desired edit point and repeat. This time you may need to enable a clip to see it because it was disabled at the last edit.

I found this to be very fast since I keep my right hand on the mouse and my left on the keyboard for shortcut keys. I flew right through the editing.

Here’s a couple more tips. To enable/disable multiple clips at once, simply select them and type control+B. To cut a clip or clips regardless of the autoselect state, simply select the clip or clips and type control+V. It will ignore the autoselect and only work on the ones you have selected. This is much faster than control clicking and choosing enable, or choosing the razor and clicking to make a cut.

Hope this helps,
Gary

[Andy Reynolds ceolnua]

Hi,

that is a great set of tips, I am using it now to edit a music video, very useful thanks!!!

What i find is that if you have a load of clips that you want to get into sync then its very easy to do with multi clip sequence but very hard to do with a regular multiclip (we dont all have timecoded multi camera shoots to work with!).

What would be great is some way of taking the tweaked multi clip sequence and turning it into a regular multiclip so that the camera angles could be chosen on the fly for music video style cuts. Is there a way of doing that?

Here is another tip/workaround that could be useful:

What i have resorted to is not multiclip at all but using a multiclip sequence as a track within another sequence, that way you can have nested sequences and the timeline doesnt get so wide that you cant see everything. What this means is that if you have (say) a series of shots in location A that are different takes of the same song being sung by a singer you can get all the various clips in lip sync within a multiclip set up just for that location, then make another one for location B and so on. Then you can bring these various multiclip sequences into a more simple three or four track sequence that then gives you the choice of cutting from location to location: all the clips inside that location do is (hopefully) put the best performance to the front each time, so you can have more of an overview of the video once the various locations are finished. That way if there is an odd bit you can dive into the relevant multi clip sequence and fix it then back out to the bigger picture. Hope that makes sense.

regards, Andy Reynolds CeolNua IRELAND

Music Production from Ireland