Multicam editing in FCP X – without multi-clips

[Loren Risker]

I’d just like to chime in with a bit of a warning – if you have a very specific FCP7 workflow that is sort of unique, FCPX will be all sorts of frustrating at first.

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OutOfFocus.TV – Original series, music videos, mini-docs.

[David Powell]

Its possible to maintain spacial relationship with secondary story lines but would be far more inefficient than doing it with a track based system. FCPX is really only good for the features where it’s made progress on 7. If you’re not taking advantage of them, you might just be slowing yourself down for no good reason.

[Tony West]

People were actually using X like this before they added multi-cam when it first came out.

Since X syncs through sound, some would just sync up the clips and stack them in the timeline
(I guess the way you do) and then just blade them.

The sound syncing seemed to make quick work of it.

While Mark makes a good point, at least X gives you the option to do it more than one way.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Powell] “ts possible to maintain spacial relationship with secondary story lines but would be far more inefficient than doing it with a track based system. “

This is a bit of a stretch.

[Bill Davis]

Beyond that, hanging on to a process that was the ONLY way to functionally do the task in a different program – now that you have new capabilities – begs the question, how do you know there’s not a better/easier way using X as it was designed than trying to hold onto what made you comfortable with the older software?

For me the major rush of learning the X way of multi-cam was the amazing improvement in FOCUS it allowed me to achieve while working much, much faster.

Instead of trying to watch 16 (or 40!) shots at a time to pick the best of the moment – I learned that there’s not penalty to doing “multiple improvement” passes in X – concentrating on groups of shots rather than trying to judge everything against everything else all the time by necessity.

IN a typical band music video, for example, during a blazing guitar solo, I STILL do my first pass, picking just a generic guitar featuring shot – knowing that when I make my second pass over JUST THAT SECTION, I’ can call up every single camera that involves the guitar player and change any of my selections – at any point in time – at will. And I can just as easily switch groups AFTER I make that cut that I *think* is my final – to see if there might be some oddball reaction from another musician or a crowd reaction to cut in if I think THAT would improve the scene flow.

Essentially, I discovered that having too many cameras was hardly EVER as good a way to create exactly the “switch” that I wanted – compared to being able to very easily focus on groups of shots and build and re-build at will – switching out shot groups at will.

Multi-cam in X is so incredibly stress free compared to the way I used to do it – that I can’t even imagine going back to the old way.

But to each their own.

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