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The exponential greatness of multicam in FCPX
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[Oliver Peters] “they shoot 1080 and cut 720 for air”
That explains why a lot of news is soft. They do realize that it all ends up on a 1080TV in the end, right?
[Oliver Peters] “1) the fact that audio gets cut with every edit (you have to detach/connect if you want one clean track of audio”
This has never been and issue/consideration for me. True, there is a cut in the audio, but does that really matter? If you’re not switching audio angles, then the audio is still just one long audio track with an invisible edit. Gives the ability to tweak clips level if needed. And if you want, you could just open up the audio components on the first track and drag it out and turn off (v) the other clips audio components.Then you could keyframe the audio track if you prefer I guess. One long audio track. Still connected.
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[Bret Williams] “That explains why a lot of news is soft. They do realize that it all ends up on a 1080TV in the end, right? “
ABC and FOX broadcast 720p60 while CBS and NBC are 1080i60, AFAIK. Not a lot of overall difference between the two in terms of quality (especially in motion). Personally, I’d rather do 720p60 as I find interlacing much more problematic.
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I know. But it’s always a mental debate in my mind whether blowing something up in a 720p timeline because you can is going to look good on a 1080tv knowing that it’s going to get blown up again. It shouldn’t, because the blow in 720p is a pixel for pixel thing, but it still seems to lose something. Logically I know it shouldn’t lose anymore than the 720 to 1080 conversion, but you’ve now blown up a clip 150% in the 720p sequence that itself is going to be blown up 150% by the TV itself. And 1080i just look sharper. How can’t it? I understand the interlacing can cause some issues on fast movement, though I never notice, but on slow moving or fairly static stuff, which makes up the majority of TV, you’ve just got that much more pixel density. Quite a bit more really.
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[James Villeneuve] “It doesn’t matter to me if the multicam function on FCPX isn’t perfectly suited to my needs. I think that any shortcomings it might have are offset by all the other awesome shit in that program (especially the new editing paradigm – metadata/organization – roles). So, no matter what you find out from this very knowledgable crowd, I don’t think you should base any final NLE decisions on just that one function.”
In my case I cut multicam 95% of the time, so it does influence my decisions strongly. From everything I understand Ppro and X are fairly equivalent in terms of multicam, each with slightly different strengths and weaknesses, so a choice between them comes down to “other awesome shit” and how you define that.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Andrew Kimery] ” I came in one day and all my edits from this one source were all off in the timeline. It was driving me nuts until the producer mentioned that he found a missing camera from early that day and added it to the existing multicam (thus shoving every down the multicam timeline to make room for it).”
Thus it was and forever shall be until they come up with an idiot proofing keyboard shortcut.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[David Powell] ” the way it cuts angles makes more sense than how PP does it IMO.”
Can you describe. I’ve worked with many NLE’s and they all use a variation on one set of keystrokes to cut to a new angle and a modified set of those keystrokes to do a replace angle. Most also use some sort of mouse clicking to accomplish the same thing, but this is a waste of efficiency IMO. How does it differ in X?
[David Powell] ” The setup process for PP’s Multicam when using multiple start stop clips is a little weirder to me. But I just have to get used to it. I’m still not confident on how the nesting works and adding angles after the fact in PP. X’s implementation is so straight forward, you could figure it all that out fairly easily.”
The nesting in Ppro couldn’t be simpler – right click on a multicam clip in the browser (or selct it and hit OPt+Cmd O) and choose open in timeline. There’s the nest and it looks and acts like any other timeline you have. You want to add an angle – put a clip on an empty track. You want to replace an angle – put the new clip on the track of the angle you want to replace. Everything about the multicam timeline is the same as a standard timeline. In fact there is a way to take a normal timeline and turn it into a multicam source timeline.
With multiple start stop clips, the timeline puts each clip on a separate track, just like Legacy used to do. To consolidate, just drag all the camera 1 clips onto a single track, being careful not to move them out of sync, and do the same with all other clips, each track representing a different angle.
If you have Plural Eyes, you can just throw all the clips from each angle on the same track and then have plural eyes sync them for you, then take the sunc timeline and turn it into a multicam source – voila, automated mulitcam timeline from multiple start stop sources. It would be nice if this could be done from within Ppro, but unlike Legacy there is no “camera angle” metadata in Ppro to align the clips with. I’ve requested it, but I don’t think it’s on the horizon.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “With multiple start stop clips, the timeline puts each clip on a separate track, just like Legacy used to do. To consolidate, just drag all the camera 1 clips onto a single track, being careful not to move them out of sync, and do the same with all other clips, each track representing a different angle.”
FCPX Puts them all on one track (most of the time!) which is good
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[James Ewart] “You are using 4K footage?
What are your deliverables?”
Deliverables are 1080p30 ProRes 422. Anything we shoot in 4K is for resizing purposes – either when someone is doing a single person demo direct to camera and we want the option to create a CU from the master shot or when we are out in the field doing small crew interviews, also to pull CU’s from wide OTS shots.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
To answer the question about Avid – they havent changed the MCAM feature yet to get with the times.
Once setup, it works great and solid, and you can commit your edits with no issues and it wont cut audio with every scene change – but setting it up is still a pain if theres cameras that start/stop thru a shoot. If not, its pretty easy to setup.
That said with the new proxy workflow in 8.3 i was happily cutting 6 angles of 4k at 1/16 resolution with no frames dropping and not a huge loss of picture quality on a pretty humble machine. Was surprised to get this performance.
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A few years ago I did tests comparing 1080i60 and 720p60 for a company I worked at and 720p60 came out on top for their particular workflow.
Short version, the 720p60 footage was on par in terms of image quality while in motion (sometimes even looking better than 1080i), it compressed much better, and it didn’t suffer from interlacing artifacts that can be a pain when you resize the frame or play with the speed.
Long version, it was for a company in the video game industry that delivered its TV shows at 1080i60 on HDCAM. I captured cut scenes from video games (console->HDMI->Blackmagic->FCP 7) in ProRes HQ as well as shot some live footage with an Sony EX1 both in 760p60 and in 1080i60. I put the footage on a 1080i60 timeline for comparison. I also laid them off to HDCAM at 1080i60 (720p to 1080i conversion was done by a blackmagic card on the fly) and bought them back into a 1080i60 sequence. For viewing I had a group of us (other editors, EP, post sup, production guys, etc.) watch a 45″ Sony HDTV (can’t remember the exact model) and a 24″ JVC b’cast monitor.
While in motion no one could tell the difference between the 720p and the 1080i unless there were interlacing artifacts. If you paused and did the whole A/B thing on a single frame you could see that the 1080i60 sourced footage was a bit sharper than the 720p60 sourced footage. The biggest difference was on fine detail things (like GFX or the HUDs in the video games) which looked great from the 720p60 source but got slaughtered by the 1080i60 interlacing. For example, small text that was legible in 720p was illegible in 1080i. Besides not having interlacing artifacts, the progressive footage also compressed much cleaner and the company created content for both the web and for TV so compressed image quality factored into the decision as well.
720p60 won the day, So everything was sourced and cut in 720p60 and then converted to 1080i60 on output by the blackmagic card in real time to layoff on to tape.
If 1080p60 would’ve been a viable option at the time then that would have been the hands down winner, but, speaking in generalities, the differences between 1080i60 and 720p60 aren’t as big as people think (including myself before I did these tests). When you really look at it though, 1080i60 is one 1920×540 frame every 1/60th of a second compared to one 1280×720 frame every 1/60th of a second for 720p60. In terms of raw number of pixels there isn’t that much difference (when is why 720p60 and 1080i data rates have nearly identical).
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