Multicam Unforseen

[Geoff Dills]

I make a synchronized clip with all my audio sources and add it to a new lane in the multicam and then sync it to one of the cameras. Then I can do any audio adjustments to the synchronized clip and use that as my sole audio source in the multicam clip.

Best,
Geoff

[Don Smith]

Thanks for the try Geoff but without common sound the clips won’t synchronize. All you hear on one clip is the host and all you hear on the other clip is the guest. In fact, the Multicam would not sync well without me adding a start marker and even then I had to go in and manually fine-tune the synch between the clips. But, having done the fine-tuning in a MultiCam clip I sure would like to enable two or more audio tracks at the same time.

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[Don Smith]

I worked around the problem by putting the multiclip down, then putting the playhead at the beginning and selected audio only and then selected one of my two audio tracks.

I then copied the MC clip and pasted it as connected in sync with the first MC clip and selected audio only at the other audio track.

That gave me multiple audio tracks enabled at the same time.

Then, in practice, only the upper MC clip would edit in the Angle View, which was fine by me. In fact, it insured that I wasn’t accidentally editing the lower MC clip.

The one problem is when i have to delete a section of the MC clip. Simply setting an IN and OUT and hitting ripple delete only affects the lower MC clip. My workaround is to Blade (with snapping on) the both MC clips along the playhead line at the beginning and end of the area I need to delete. Then I select the bladed clips and Ripple Delete and that kept the two MC clips in sync. It’s a pain and its more tricky if you’re doing that method at the very beginning of the clips.

Add to my wish list for FCPX improvements is the ability to enable more than one audio track at a time in a MC Angle Viewer.

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[Tony Sarafoski]

Don i’ve been using the multicam feature a fair bit the past few weeks and have faced similar problems. What i do is start by creating the multicam clip, add and sync any additional angles, and finally place the multicam clip in a primary storyline.

Next I re-open the MC in the angle editor, select all the clips, copy, go back to my timeline (placing the playhead at the beginning), and paste. Essentially what this does is places all your clips (from within the multicam) as connected clips within storylines. Now to break apart the audio from these clips, you’ll need to lift them out of their storylines.

Providing you followed these steps correctly, you should now be left with your multicam clip still sitting in the primary storyline, and a buch of connected clips. Delete whatever connected clips you don’t need, and your good to go.

As you’ve discovered in order to ripple delete sections out, you’ll need to position your playhead, press command+a, to select all, then command+b to blade all.

Hope that all makes sense.

[Bill Davis]

It’s also perfectly reasonable to “rough switch” in Multicam with a single guide track – then simply do an “audio insert only” to bring in as many connected audio clips from the other angles as you like. (Audio only insert lives in the dashboard section to the right of the Keyframe call up and you invoke “audio only” insert by the tiny toggle adjacent or keyboard equivalent)

The result looks a bit like Legacy with one video (multicam) clip – and as many audio clips connected underneath as you like.

You can tweek the alignment using the audio waveforms pretty easily then just drag down the audio from your original multiclip – and slice and dice your audio using discrete tracks as needed.

In the Jazz video I did a couple of months ago, I had more than a dozen synchronized tracks below a multicam clip in the X interface – each a unique stem from the multi-track audio recording – and it worked really well with easy real-time playback and monitoring.

No reason you can’t do the same with multiple camera mics.

FWIW

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Mark Morache]

I got frustrated and fed up with the multicam editing. The inability to collapse clips is a frustration. The inability to have audio from multiple clips without much gymnastics is frustrating.

I got an inspiration the other day and tried it with a recent edit with some multicam.

It’s a little convoluted, but it worked.

I need my multicam clip with the needed audio tracks broken out so I could switch the angles, and deal with the audio separately. I can’t switch between audio angles because I may need channels from each clip up all at once.

So I made my multicam clip. I then created a compound clip, containing the mc clip. I stepped inside the compound, then inside the multicam. Once inside the multicam I selected the cameras and cmd-c to copy the clips then I stepped back out of the multicam clip, and now inside my compound clip I place the skimmer at the top of the clip and opt-v to paste the clips as connected clips. I then break these clips apart, delete the video and any unnecessary audio tracks. I set the audio level of the multicam clip to -96 since I’ll be using the separated clips for audio mixing. Now I step out of the compound clip.

I’m left with a compound clip consisting of the multicam clip, and individual audio tracks for each microphone.

I was surprised to see that with the angle viewer open, by skimming over my compound clip in the event browser, I could see the angles of the multicam clip embeddded inside. I edit the compound clip into my timeline. I break it apart to make camera selections and edit my audio.

I can then either leave the clips broken apart, or re-compound them in the timeline.

I anticipate that someday the programmers will come up with a better way to edit audio in the timeline, without all the stepping in and out of the clips. Until then,

It’s several steps, but I only do it once for each multicam clip, and doesn’t take too long.

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Don Smith]

Great post Mark M. I’m going to try that.

Now, I’ve discovered another limitation of MultiCam clips; it doesn’t appear to process video the same as it would if the same clips were outside the MC clip.

For example, I’ve got a three camera MC clip. The producer asked me to scale up the wide shot to crop out some cables at the edge of the frame. I scaled the shot maybe 10%. On XDCAM footage shot with a high-end Sony XDCAM disc camera at 1920×1080 a 10% scale shouldn’t visibly soften the shot. But in the MC clip, the shot is very soft. Today I’ll take that shot and copy it to be outside the MC clip to see if that would render to be sharper. It should.

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[Mark Morache]

Don… I’d do a test. Put a bit of your multicam clip in a fresh timeline along with a bit of the same clip by itself (not part of the multicam clip) and export it with the current settings.

Play the clip in quicktime and see if there’s a difference.

I suspect that FCPX may playback mc clips at a lower resolution since so much bandwidth is needed. I’ve noticed the lessened quality when editing but have not noticed any issues when I export the final clip. I believe FCP7 operated likewise.

I hope they start taking care of these things with a new update soon. I’m feeling a bit discouraged that a lot of obvious issues haven’t been addressed yet.

With that said, I love how easy it is to select and cut camera angles in the angle editor. I really miss the ability to collapse the timeline clips back to their original clips because in FCP7 I used to group select my multicam clips in the timeline, option-drag them to a higher video track to create copies, then collapse the copied clips back to the originals. This allowed me to see the final cut in full res without rendering.

Let me know if you do the test, and what you find out.

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Andrew Hays]

I think this may be what I’m going to have to do in order to work around what appears to be a bug in fcpx. Whenever you adjust or mix audio in each camera’s own timeline, there appears to be a three to four db difference in audio gain when you go back to the main timeline…

..and knowing is half the battle.