Exporting multiclips to quicktime as a 4-up view

[Don Greening]

[Sunit Parekh-Gaihede] “Short of manually re-creating the entire edit (21min) with four overlaid camera tracks (scaled/transformed to each their corner) does anyone have a better method for trying to output the multiclip view?”

That was the method I would be using. But have you noticed that when you have sync set to OPEN in the canvas and you have playback set to cinema desktop preview in the View menu that FCP plays back the Viewer window with all the angles. If you could somehow record what’s playing on your second monitor you would have a duplicate of the Viewer playback for your animation reference.

– Don

Don Greening
A Vancouver Video Production Company
Reeltime Videoworks
http://www.reeltimevideoworks.com

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve never figured it out, but i have seen fx templates that are preconfigured to do multiple windows, beyond two.haven’t needed them yet, but it might be worth the investment, or create your own, to simulate it? Think split screen.but i agree it would be cool to go from single take in multiview to seeing four screens simultaneously in the video easily.

Alf

[Sunit Parekh-gaihede]

Thanks for the replies. Would using fx templates simply be a way of simplifying the task of transforming each clip of the multi clip? Or, alternatively, is it possible to use the plugin sdk to transform existing clips, or apply other clip level operations on a sequence?

I’ve also thought about using a video/screen capture, as Don suggests, but I haven’t tested the fidelity of running a frame capture while the clips are also playing. Considering that I would need to individually capture each multi clip anyways, it seems like I would just be better off reconstructing the edit with transformed clips.

Sunit

[Sunit Parekh-gaihede]

FYI – what I ended up doing was writing a python script that would parse the Final Cut XML from the source, extract the multi-clips with angles, and recreate a new XML file with each angle transformed to its correct corner in the view.

I could then import this XML into FCP and render it out. We have a lot of 4 camera sequences, so the overhead of writing a script made sense, and the solution is now programmatic (rather than manual).

The most complex part of the process was the parse/recreate of the XML format through Python – I wonder if someone’s written a Final Cut XML library for Python to make that work easier.

In any case, thanks for the input.

Sunit

[Misha Mazor]

Hey there,
Would love to get my hands on that script you created. Any chance you could post it?

Thanks!
Misha