Multicam in 10.0.8 kinda messed up?

[Lucas Barros]

I always sync my multicams using plural eyes.
Now that it is a stand alone program, it’s very very reliable.
FCPX generated multicams never seem to work properly for me,
maybe it’s my lack of patience for something that I know it will be easier to do with PE3.

And yes, I feel my 10.0.8 version is way more “crashy” as well.

Lucas de Barros
http://www.novelofilmes.com.br

[Bret Williams]

I’ve never had one not sync. And now, seems that nothing is syncing. I’ve got great camera audio and clear wav files. Crap is just all over the place. Camera angles and shot order are lining up, but nothing is syncing for squat except the chance take or two here or there. My first multicam in 10.0.8 is a bust.

Might just see how PPro CC handles it.

[Bret Williams]

I think it’s my footage. 2 DSLRs – one is an hour off on it’s internal clock. The audio files are 12 hours off. So when there is a break in all 3, FCP really has no idea how much of a gap to insert. If the audio file were contiguous, it wouldn’t be a problem. But for some reason the crew decided it would be best to stop the audio whenever they stopped camera, which does help in logging, but in this case, there is nothing holding the whole thing together. No base track. Or at least FCP can’t figure out the base correctly every time.

[David Eaks]

I’m still on 10.0.7 but whenever I’ve had any problems with Multi cam not automatically syncing and laying out the angles properly, I simply make sure the the camera name and angle fields in the inspector are filled in for each clip. Then the automatic sync behaves as expected.

Doesn’t really sound like that’s your problem, but its worth a shot.

FWIW I’m not sure that I’ve ever worked with a base track, all my multicam projects have been synced on a clip by clip level with automatic and sync using audio settings.

[Bret Williams]

Well I was right. And yes, all the angles (cam 1, cam 2, and audio) were labeled. (All that really screws up if you don’t have them marked is you end up with a new layer for each clip.)

Maybe base track wasn’t the right phrase. What I have is an interview. Two Canon 5Ds with good on cam audio. And a standalone recording on wav file. There are 3 wav files encompassing the whole interview because whenever they stopped camera they would stop the wav. Of course they didn’t stop perfectly in sync, but generally. The 5Ds would also have other breaks, because it was a long interview. So each camera might have 6-9 files. Some contiguous breaks, others because they were changing a card or stopped to change angles or something.

Problem for FCP is that since they all had different clocks, it didn’t know what do do when all the cameras were stopped at the same time. It didn’t know which clock to go on I guess. I would get different results each time I tried. I’m guessing it picks one at random, but then discovers that there isn’t as big a break in the video track, so it just bumps the video trrack back as far as possible and screws things up down the line and so on.

But to test my theory, I broke it up into 3 multicams. One for each audio bit, and the corresponding camera clips. It passed every time.

So the lesson here might be to let the audio run as a solid base track during the entire interview and/or get the clocks on your cameras and audio devices right.

[David Eaks]

Ahh, when all recorders are stopped and none of the clips time info matches… Whats an FCPX to do??

I think base track was a good term, or I was able to understand what you meant by it at least. I just meant that I never have one long audio track to sync all my video clips to. Main audio is on-camera XLR.

So, you used each of the three audio clips as a base track for the corresponding camera clips, to make three separate Multicam clips. And all is good?

Even though you got it covered already, it should be able to sync it all at once automatically. Have you tried with all settings automatic except for clip ordering set to content created? I shoot the vast majority of my work, most is multicam switched live and recorded to KiPro. When I am shooting for post multicam switching I am admittedly pretty care free with start/stop on unsynced cameras.

Also, I really prefer to work with Prores for multicam edits. Maybe it’s just my old Mac Pro but it seems like even though I can skim around and make cuts fast enough. At some point through the workflow something will make me wish I just optimized in the first place.

[Bill Rabkin]

I typically shoot with 3 cameras, 2 miniDV tape and one tapeless that records .AVI files. For a one-hour concert, I will import 1 miniDV clip from each camera plus 4 contiguous .AVI files from the tapeless camera.

I generally avoid FCPX auto-sync’ing based on audio tracks. Instead, I use a clapboard before the concert begins and in FCPX I insert a marker on each camera’s clip. (For the .AVI files, this is the first clip of the concert.) To create my multicam clip I tell FCPX to sync using first markers.

Then, in the multicam editor I simply insert the remaining contiguous clips of .AVI files into that angle of the multicam clip. This approach has worked pretty well for me.

FastBill

[Bret Williams]

Certainly would. But it’s a manual process. And requires slating every scene. Certainly would’ve been useful in this case. However, the camera folks were also inexplicably stopping for 2-20 seconds at a time during the interviews. Those bits would have still required manual syncing or automated waveform syncing (which wasn’t working well this go round).

BTW I tried the same clips in PPro CC version of this and it either doesn’t work at all or I’m doing it wrong. Nothing came out synced at all.

[David Powell]

It certainly is more crash prone . If you don’t have a continuous audio track running beneath its def not going to sync, and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even if the internal clocks were matching. I sync everything with plural eyes which gets messy in cases like this because you end up with multiple events, but what I found is that whenever you have a long multi clip synced all the way through, 10.08 will crash every time you hit a gap of black. Huge PITA! You have to watch out for them and delete them before the playhead hits the black.

[Tim Jones]

We just covered this in the RevUpTransmedia’s mini-course on multi-cam (best $20 I’ve ever spent, BTW). Did you create a new Multicam Clip from the sources?

Lesson 6 in Michael Wohl’s “Final Cut Pro X Advanced Editing” also covers it very well.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
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