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multicam clip is black
I’ve created a multicam clip, and all of the clips are showing when I double-click the clip to break them apart, but show up as mostly black in the timeline. I can scrub through the clip and see the angles but can’t seem to have them all show in timeline to edit. I’ve done render file delete, restart fcpx but did not not work. Any ideas what I’m missing? Thanks!
FCPX 10.5.1
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11 Replies
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Did you ever figure this out? It’s happening to me.
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I’d redo the multicam in this case. It looks like you’ve only got 2 actual cameras, but an angle for each clip. What you’re seeing is what is available at the playhead position in the multi viewer, and what is available in the particular angle of video being monitored in the timeline.
So the way I’d set that up:
1. In the browser, select all of the Cam 1 clips
2. Go to the Info tab of the Inspector, set it to General or Extended view (at the bottom left of the pane), and put ‘Cam 1’ in the Camera Angle field
3. Repeat these two steps for Cam 2, Cam 3, etc. If you’ve got external audio recorded, add one for Sync Audio too.
4. Select ALL of the camera clips (and audio if applicable) in the browser and create your new multicam clip.
This will reduce the number of angles to the number of actual cameras on the shoot, and they can all sync via audio (or TC if you’ve got that sorted out, most don’t).
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This is just a guess, but I think the timeline thumbnails are not deleted by deleting render files. Also I think the multicam clip has separate thumbnails vs those for the parent clips. It might be possible for the multicam thumbnails to be corrupt or missing, yet the thumbnails for the parent clips to be OK.
There is no FCP command to delete thumbnails but you can do it manually by using Finder (carefully). Go inside the library package, Render Files folder and delete the two folders Thumbnail Media and Peaks Data. Restart FCP. See if that makes the multicam thumbnails reappear.
There was a fix in FCP 10.6 about thumbnails would sometimes not appear in the browser or timeline. So people running FCP versions before 10.6 might see that.
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I’m not sure it has anything to do with thumbs, but maybe you’re seeing something I’m not…
It appears to be an 8-angle multicam clip, with the video monitoring on clip 1577 (OP would need to scroll up a touch in the pic on the right to see it). This is reflected in the pic on the left, where you can only see the contents of angle 1577 in the timeline, because there aren’t any cuts and there’s nothing else in that angle downstream (black).
All of that lines up with the playhead position, which is the same in both images.
I still think rebuilding the Multi as described fixes the whole thing, but I could be wrong.
EDIT – cleaned up some weird markup that appeared after I posted.
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I set up a test case to show what I’m on about. Perfectly normal behavior given the setup, from what I can see.
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Doug, you are correct! The thumbnails shown on the timeline will switch based on the selected monitoring angle. If monitoring an angle where the parent clip stretches across the timeline, then no timeline thumbnails will be black. If monitoring an angle (yellow box in angle viewer) where it’s a short parent clip, then only that short length of the timeline will have thumbnails. The others will be black. That is expected.
You’re right the OP’s case was only two cameras and was not assembled properly when the multicam was created. In turn that was likely caused by not labeling the clips correctly with a camera name or angle name in the inspector. E.g, cam 1 for the long clip and cam 2 for all the short clips.
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Thanks so much, Doug. I appreciate your detailed help! Question: what purpose does it serve to add the “Cam 1” or “Cam 2” info into the inspector? Does that affect anything?
I don’t know if you can tell…but I had two cameras and three angles. After creating the multicam with just the two cameras, I added an angle and copied/pasted one of the clips into the new angle. That angle is just cropped in on my 4k footage a little more. So now I have a medium shot and close-up. Is that wrong the way I did it? Is that what messed it up?
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Ok, thx Joe!
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Yeah, it was weird. I did have the footage in the multicam (at every angle) when the timeline goes black. I think it was a glitch. I deleted a number of plugins, and it seems to be working after that.
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When you identify your angles in the inspector (prior to creating the multicam clip), you’re telling Final Cut to put all of those clips in the same angle, instead of treating each clip as its own angle.
Say you’ve been shooting all day with Cam A and Cam B… a few hundred clips wouldn’t be unheard of. But you only want 2 angles. One for each camera.
Duplicating a clip into a new angle zoomed in as MCU shouldn’t be any trouble as long as it’s synced with the rest of the angles.
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