[David Eaks]

Hi Lisa,

I do much of the same type of work as you and I wholeheartedly agree with Roger about using a switcher for live stage events. I couldn’t imagine working for the last 15 years without one. I record in-camera as well as the live switch in case I want to fix an ill-timed switch in post. I also send a feed of my mixed audio to the XLR input on one of the cameras as a back up of the “good” audio. FCPX is great for the post workflow, replacing a bad switch is pretty easy.

FWIW, here is a list of my gear for multicam live switch recording (and easy live streaming when required)-

4 Sony NX5u’s
Panasonic AW-HS50 Switcher
AJA Ki Pro
Mackie 1402 VLZ3
Livestream Broadcaster
AJA Hi-5’s (one to the Broadcaster and one to a 40″ HDTV in the lobby by the refreshments displaying 1920×1080 live during the show and playback at intermission/afterward, Families LOVE this).

If you could squeeze two HD cameras, the AW-HS50 switcher and a Ki Pro into a $15,000 budget, I think you’d have a great base for live HD recording. AW-HS50 today at B&H $3449.00- https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist.jsp&sku=706617&q=1&Q=add&is=REG&A=cart
Before I bought the Ki Pro I had an Atomos Samurai, I didn’t like it and if I kept it over last last year or so I would have been totally screwed in many situations during live productions when I needed features of the Ki Pro.

Before the Samurai, I was capturing in FCP 7 with a 17″ MBP and a Matrox MXO2LE. Never a problem with that setup but it just wasn’t a robust road-worthy setup. It was awesome for shooting training videos and editing after each scene right there with the client as we work. Most of my videos are like 90% cut when I leave the shoot, which allows for fast turnaround times.

Unfortunately, from looking at a few of the videos on your website, I don’t think your DVDs will see much improvement from the quality you are doing now (lookin good!). DVD is SD whether it came from HD or not and SD is, well, SD. On the other hand, I can tell your online videos and Blu-rays will be absolutely beautiful once you move to HD. I really hope the quality (or lack thereof) of DVD does not discourage you from going HD. I am very happy since moving to HD and I attribute the sizable increase in business and income over the last couple years directly to HD (and the COW for helping me figure it all out). Bad economy bad shmeshmonomy, IME.

Some of my long-time clients have reported that they noticed an increase in the quality of our DVDs (was using Sony Betacam SP’s, and DSR 250’s in the SD days). One new client reported back that “the DVD is very fuzzy on my HDTV”. They had been watching the same video which I uploaded to YouTube in 1080 before receiving their DVD. I can’t blame them at all, by comparison the DVD IS fuzzy. Good thing I already gave them a complimentary Blu-ray with the DVD, they took it to their friends house and LOVED it. I think that my HD down converted for DVD looks great when viewing on an old sub 30″ CRT SDTV (maybe the best DVD quality I’ve ever done), but its only so-so on a 65″ HD TV (as is expected).

When I was still using FCP7, I would downscale HD to SD by playing out my finished HD timeline via Print to Video and recording the output from the Matrox MXO2LE as SD on my Ki Pro, then bring in that SD Prores file and compress for DVD. Now in FCPX I just drop my final HD edit into an SD timeline and export. The result is slightly softer, but seems “cleaner” to me.

IMO do not “upgrade” to a current Mac Pro, they are over priced and outdated. Your iMac will probably suffice until Apple announces “something great in 2013” as a replacement to the Mac Pro.

You’ll need lots of hard drive storage, FW 800 7200 rpm is the absolute minimum. RAID-0 is good, backup is required. Today is a good day to buy hard drives online.

Get an SSD for your system drive. If you can get by with 128GB for just OS and apps, it’s all of ~$90 get get a Crucial M4 at B&H.

The Panasonic switcher needs HD-SDI cameras, unless you want to buy and then have to setup HDMI/SDI converters on every shoot. A Geffen Convert DVI is great for getting analog signals into the switcher (especially power point presentations) through the DVI input.

I had a Canon G10, the little brother of the XA-10, for a short while. I was definitly impressed with the little guy. It was great for a static wide shot but the HDMI did not send a proper HD signal to the DVI (as is mentioned in the manual, as well as the XA-10 or I would have upgraded to that) input on my switcher, so I had to return it.

One thing that was a bit of a problem when I first moved to HD is that you cannot comfortably operate the rocker zoom on the lens from the normal standing position (left hand on lens zoom & right on pan handle) because the camera handle is in the way (at least on my NX5’s). So I use LANC zoom handles, I found the ~$90 Libec to be just as good or better than the ~$300 Sony rm1bp).

That’s everything I can think of at the moment. 🙂

[David Eaks]

[wayne kurtz] “I will try to apple pro res. I know about not putting media on internal HD, but as the drive is portioned they said it is a separate drive and to try that, as going over FW still bot as fast and perhaps that reason for crashing.”

While a partitioned hard drive is recognized and shows up in the OS as two separate drives, it is still physically one hard drive. So, this means that one hard drive has to access it’s “OS Partition” to run your OS and Apps and at the same time access the “Media Partition” for your HD Media while editing. Any firewire 800 7200 rpm drive (or better) used solely for your media will be a better situation than this. They are inexpensive, especially on the internet right now. While you are shopping for your new external drive today, you might as well grab an SDD and a 3.5″ adapter to use as your OS drive. The SSD does not really need to be that big, I’m getting by fine with 128GB SSD’s in both my Macs.

I also suggest you use Prores but even if it alleviates the problem, you’re still in direct violation of the #1 cardinal rule of editing, “keep media on a separate drive than the OS and Apps, and don’t fill the drive over 80% capacity” (or is the #1 rule about backups and redundancy? I forget).

I’m sorry that the “Genius” suggested a partition for your media, that is a terrible suggestion. The Apple Store is great for stuff like setting up a new iPad but not so much for setting up an editing suite.

[David Eaks]

I much prefer the list view for the event browser, its in the bottom left, the button with a filmstrip and three lines under it. Mess around with the view and sort settings down there.

Think of keyword collections as bins. So you import clips into the event and then you can sort them into keyword collections, but clips aren’t actually moved like with bins. Keyword collections are more like a view filter, clicking a keyword collection “hides” the clips that don’t have that keyword and when you click on the event itself it’ll always show all the clips in that event and all of its keyword collections.

But you don’t even necessarily need to have keyword collections at all in order to create a multicam clip. You can simply import all your clips to the event, select the clips and choose create multicam clip (of course it’s a good idea to use keyword collections and stay organized).

[David Eaks]

I was referring to when you initially create the multicam clip, selecting all the camera clips and the audio file in the event browser then select create multicam clip. FCPX should be able to put it all together, even if the cameras were stopped/started throughout the shoot. Entering some metadata in the inspector helps to ensure it gets sorted out correctly.

When you tried “sync to monitoring angle”, did you have the audio clip selected? And which angle was set as the monitoring angle (the little monitor icon on the left of each track)?

To get out of the angle viewer, click the back arrow in the top left of the timeline window. Next to these back/fourth arrows is a “file path” style display of where you are in the project.

[David Eaks]

Have you given the audio an “angle name”? In the inspector, general/extended view. You should be able to select all four clips in the Event browser, choose create multicam clip and be good to go (after double checking that everything is in perfect sync)..

If you need to add the audio to an existing multicam clip, go to the angle editor and add the audio into a new angle, then “sync to monitoring angle”. Or you could add and manually sync the audio from within one of the cameras (open in timeline, add & sync audio, then disable camera audio if needed). Or use “synchronize clips” to sync the audio as a connected clip to the Multicam clip.

[David Eaks]

I think your going to have to break that down into multiple sequences. For instance if the final video is going to be a “video wall” effect of all 50 angles at once (probably not), break it down so each sequence is only one section of the screen with only a few angles (eg top left section, mid left, lower left, top center etc.). Then export each sequence to “bake in” the effects, then composite it all together.

Are the three external drives your using individual drives or fast RAIDS? How are they connected to your system?

If your using individual FireWire drives to edit a 50 angle multicam clip with a deadline that is so rushed that you don’t have time to simply copy media to a drive, someone is crazy.

I’d definitely like to see the end product and some behind the scenes stuff.

[David Eaks]

Does this fit your needs?

https://www.fullcompass.com/product/391662.html?utm_source=googleps&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign=googleps&gclid=CMHbu9DR5bMCFUxxQgodDCgA2w

[David Eaks]

You could capture directly to the laptop, from the KiPro output (to an external drive or second internal via OWC Data Doubler). Then the files are already on the laptop as soon as the recording is finished and it adds another layer of redundancy.

[David Eaks]

Try exporting your HD project with current settings, then bring that file into a new project. Change this new project’s settings to SD then export the timeline. Bring the exported SD file into compressor and burn same as before.

Or just duplicate the HD project, change the duplicate project to SD then export and burn.

It should be a little better, the image will be soft especially on an HDTV but should be pretty clean and free of compression artifacts and “blockiness”. The DVD should look pretty darn good when viewed on and old 4:3 SD CRT TV. The thing is, a DVD is never going to look as good as your HD project. I’ve found the above method to be comparable to hardware downscaling to SD with either my Matrox MXO2 LE or AJA Ki Pro before compressing and burning the DVD.

The real solution is to burn a Blu-ray. Blu-ray burners are cheap, but the encode time is long (Matrox MAX takes care of that). Your customers will need a Blu-ray player and an HDTV to really appreciate your original HD quality. Or upload HD to YouTube or give them an HD digital file to play on their computer or iPhone/iPad etc. Some HDTV’s and Blu-ray players even have USB ports or SD Card readers and can play HD video from a USB drive or SD card.

Personally, I’m anxious for the DVD format to die out, it is obsolete. Unfortunately, it’s still in wide use and we all have to deal with it.

[David Eaks]

In other words, when Optimize is greyed out FCPX has determined that there will be no benefit to optimizing the video. If you import with neither optimize or proxy selected, it will come in as native.

Basically your good to go with what you have.