The exponential greatness of multicam in FCPX

[Robin S. kurz]

[Herb Sevush] “So I guess you don’t know Oliver Peters or David Lawrence”

No, I don’t. You’re right.

– RK

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[Andrew Kimery]

[James Ewart] “Essentially if it isn’t syncing quite right or you don’t have audio for a camera for some reason it pulls up a two up display. Park the playhead on the monitoring angle in the Angle Editor and that is the right window and on the left window you can skim along the angle that you need to sync and match frames visually when you find the matching frame, just click and BINGO. It pulls it into sync for you.”

I do not know. Whenever I’ve had to do this in PPro (or FCP Legend or Avid) I’ve just loaded the other angle into the source monitor, found the visual sync point, then edited that angle back into the timeline. I wonder if this is a mechanism Apple devised since they intended for X to just have a single monitoring window?

[James Ewart]

[Andrew Kimery] “I do not know. Whenever I’ve had to do this in PPro (or FCP Legend or Avid) I’ve just loaded the other angle into the source monitor, found the visual sync point, then edited that angle back into the timeline.”

In truth I can no longer remember how this works in FCP legend. i dare say I’d pick it back up but i do vividly recall being thrilled at how much better it was at all the preparatory and sync work than i had been used to in FCP7. Actually that was the turning post for me especially the ability to cut single camera multi take shoots in Multicam mode.

[Andrew Kimery]

[James Ewart] ” i dare say I’d pick it back up but i do vividly recall being thrilled at how much better it was at all the preparatory and sync work than i had been used to in FCP7. “

I can totally relate to that. From the prep side and adjustment side X and PPro are so much easier and faster than FCP 7 or Avid it’s not even funny. The first time I did a multicam project in PPro and the prep literally took minutes instead of hours I was so happy I wanted to hug my computer!

[James Ewart]

Please explain why when I have been editing video only I have cuts in my master audio on every video cut and how that benefits me?

Also I have no wish to apply blanket filters across a one hour Multicam timeline.

1_audiocuts.tiff.jpg

[Bill Davis]

[James Ewart] “Please explain why when I have been editing video only I have cuts in my master audio on every video cut and how that benefits me?”

I’ll take a guess.

Since, unlike virtually all other NLEs – X does not treat audio and video as exclusively separate elements from square one – and in fact, is totally comfortable working with a mixed audio/video clip as a single element – at some stage, the designers had to make a choice.

When the editor applies the metadata to say “cut the muxed clip HERE” – there are two ways you can go.

You can apply that ONLY to the video and give the user no indication that the audio portion of the mixed clip has a frame where the video was cut – OR you can provide a marker on both tracks that the user can either interact with or ignore.

If you ignore it, it’s just a through edit so playback remains unchanged. So the users gets something (the edit marker) and gives up nothing except extra dotted lines on their storyline.

If you eliminate it, then nobody can go back and ever see where there might be a matching cut in the audio to go with a cut in the video.

It’s a judgement call as to which approach is more useful to a particular editor’s preferred workflow.

But you can easily make the case for each approach, particularly since X comes with the ability to break apart clip items and let you separate video and audio out.

Basically, this could be seen as editors being annoyed by having “too much visual information?”

I get that it’s been problematic since at least at one point, there was an audio anomaly associated with the cut point – but that’s a different problem, IMO.

Just one way to look at it, not necessarily the right or wrong one.

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[James Ewart]

Changed this post have had more time to consider.

I suppose it would be helpful if somewhere in the manual or help pages it actually told you it cut the audio as well (with ‘video only’ selcted)rather than having to find out for oneself. So perhaps the recommended workflow should be to detach audio first or are you saying what look like audio edits are just markers showing where the edits are? Because I am sure I hear clipping and popping but maybe mistaken. I thought this was what Oliver was talking about.

Am I muddled?

Or maybe it’s assuming that we should always “layback” a new clean master audio?

Thanks