Brad Hurley
Forum Replies Created
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“Thank you . Which software do you think will work the best for the specific use with gtr hand motion in your opinion? Ray”
Your approach of using two cameras and cutting to the other view is a common way of dealing with jump cuts; another way of course is to use B-roll but I guess that’s not an option if you’re trying to depict a seamless performance.
Do you have Final Cut already, and if so have you tried the “Flow” transition? I noticed after I posted my reply above that it’s effectively not adjustable in Final Cut (I mostly use Resolve, and its “Smooth Cut” transition is adjustable in terms of length). Final Cut uses a duration of six frames.
You might as well just experiment with it in Final Cut. For variety you could use Flow in the cases where it works and use your current method of cutting to another camera view when it doesn’t.
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Try this: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/final-cut-pro/ver46d0179ac/mac
Known as “flow” in Final Cut Pro X, “Morph Cut” in Premiere, and “Smooth Cut” in DaVinci Resolve. It uses Optical Flow to merge jump cuts. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t; you can experiment with the length of the transition to get the best result. Note that Optical Flow is processor-intensive and you should have background rendering turned on if you want to watch the result play back at full speed.
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“Assuming you are using H.264 or HEVC, you will want a sufficiently new machine with Quick Sync hardware acceleration for this.”
I didn’t even think of that, it’s an important point.
I think of those as delivery codecs, not something I’d ever want to work with in an NLE, but I know plenty of people do. If I were using an older machine I’d transcode to optimized media; all the footage I work with is shot directly in Prores HQ and my underpowered Mac Mini with integrated Intel graphics has no problem with that.
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The nice thing about FCPX is that it is optimized for the Mac and will run (albeit slowly in some cases) on pretty much any Mac. I have a Mac Pro for real work, but my test machine is a 2014 i5 Mac Mini with only 8 gigs of RAM and it runs Final Cut just fine. You will need background rendering turned on if you want real-time playback, but Final Cut has been totally stable for me even with things like denoising and multiple layers of color correction.
I think you have a lot of choices available. In addition to used, you should consider buying refurbished from the Apple store online. I buy all my Apple products that way and have so for the past 10 years or more, and have never had a problem.
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For a first assembly, I use the function keys although I agree that they could be better mapped. I believe they were based on the old Final Cut Pro 7 keyboard shortcuts; you can’t fully implement the more intuitive set of shortcuts in FCPX (e.g., w for insert edit, e for append to the end of the timeline, etc.) because some of those shortcuts are reserved by Resolve for other editing functions (e is for an extend edit for example). If you want to set video-only in and out points on a clip, instead of just typing i and o, type option-shift-i (alt-shift-i on Windows) for a video-only in point and option-shift-o for a video-only out point. For audio-only in and out points, use command-shift-i and command-shift-o (control-shift-i and control-shift-o in Windows).
The track destination controls offer an efficient way of adding clips to the timeline without having to drag and drop: if you are adding a bunch of b-roll and don’t want any audio to come with it, simply disable all the audio track destination controls and the audio will have no place to go. Then do a “place on top” edit.
Once you have your timeline assembled and you start moving clips around, inserting new ones, doing four-point edits, etc. it becomes trickier; this is where you have to start minding the auto-select buttons since those will determine which tracks are affected by your edits. I think of this as a process that starts by selecting the clips you want to add, then preparing your timeline tracks (enabling and disabling track destination controls and auto-select buttons as needed), and then finally editing the clips into the timeline.
I highly recommend the free PDF “Advanced Editing in Resolve 15” (which also works for Resolve 16 as long as you’re not using the Cut page), which is available in the Training section of the DaVinci Resolve website. It’s excellent and if you download their footage and follow along you will learn skills that will save you dozens if not hundreds of hours in the years ahead.
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Have you checked out the Lumberjack Builder NLE?
I’m not sure if it handles multicam, but it does allow you to construct videos based on transcripts and is pretty amazing: you edit the text and that edits the audio and video in real time, plus you can search for phrases, move topics around, etc., all based on text.
Mark Spencer did a detailed demo of it in one of his Ripple Training tutorials on editing interviews in Final Cut Pro X; Lumberjack also has a quick demo on their website but it doesn’t give you a full appreciation of what it can do (I haven’t used it myself but was really impressed by what I saw in Mark’s tutorial).
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The stabilization in FCPX isn’t great, at least in my experience. I’ve heard good things about the Lock and Load plugin, but it’s $100, which might not be worth it for one clip. A free solution would be to download the free version of DaVinci Resolve, which has a very good stabilizer on the color page, and run that clip through it.
Resolve is a very GPU-hungry NLE; if you’re using a MacBook Pro or older Mac Mini you might have trouble and you might not get real-time playback. But you could try running that clip through the stabilizer in Resolve, render the clip in Resolve as a Prores HQ file, and bring it back into Final Cut and replace the clip in your timeline.
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Also forgot to mention: there’s a mute button just below the timeline viewer, click on the speaker icon to the left of the volume slider and the DIM button.
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Clicking the mute buttons on the audio tracks doesn’t work? It works for me.
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“Fascinating stuff – as a feature editor myself, I love articles that dig deeper than your typical press junket (especially those frame.io blog posts!).”
It kind of blows me away that frame.io invests this much in journalism (and very good journalism at that) for their blog. They must see a return for it in terms of subscribers and name recognition, but it’s impressive that they manage to consistently put out meaty, information-rich articles that are well researched and written.