3 camera edit
 

Is there a way in FCP to assign a button to show one track and hide the others. Its a pain changing the track visibility to see the footage from a particular camera, wish there was a easier way.

edit: never mind, figured it out hold down option key while clicking on track visibility button.

Pete,

If you are cutting a 3-camera shoot you should really look into multicam editing. It is way easier than layering the 3 cameras on top of each other in the timeline and constantly switching the views.

The basic steps are:
-Find a common sync point on all three cameras (if you didn't jam sync TC) and mark an IN on each clip.
-COMMAND-Select the three clips of the three cameras (one tape at a time to avoid confusion) and then right-click (or CTRL click) and select Make Multiclip. Choose in-points.
-Now just throw this new multi-clip into your sequence
-Go to the gang menu on the record side and select open. You should now see all three cameras on the source monitor.
-Hit play and click on each camera to do live switching. You can then tweak all the edits and change cameras as long as gang is set to "open."

I wish I had known about this before I did this project. I already made my edits so I'm not going to go back and redo it but I'm sure to use this technique next time. Thx

As a side note the audio from this one is a little tricky and is easier to work with 3 tracks instead of multiclip. One camera took audio from the soundboard and its distorted for everything except for when the mc talks on the mic. The second camera was set to auto levels and used a the built in mic, its audio is good except for the mic-ed mc and at other quite parts of the performance. The third camera used a off camera mic and the gain was set manually different for the left and right channel (one optimized for loud parts and the other for quite parts). At some parts I want to duplicate a channel and at others use a different camera. And throw in that even when video is synced the audio is always from the sound board is a few mill a seconds out of sync with the the other cameras. So its a mess dealing with the audio. I'm not sure how one would deal with that with multiclip.

you'd just layer the audio and fix as per your current method but use multiclip to switch the video

as for your current method of switching, rather than switching track visibility you can simply select clips and press Control B to toggle visibility (Modify menu > Clip Enable/Disable)

thx andy, that work too, before i was losing my renders with track visibility so that also is a nice technique.

You know Andy, I've been working in FCP for 10 years (version 1.0.2) and I never knew that trick! Thanks for sharing.

+1

How do you sync up the layered audio with the multiclip?

If I understand correctly, I'll have a multiclip with one video and two audio tracks, then two more audio tracks for each camera layered below (??). I need to work with the audio, massaging, keyframing each one up or down to create a fluid flow along the piece. I see how to do this outside the multiclip, but don't see how to sync the layered audio with the multiclip.

Also, I've chosen in points for each video clip for syncing the multiclip, but now that it's created, I want to use footage outside the In points. Is that possible, if so how?

I created a thread about this. I don't care for how Apple implemented multiclip. It would have made more sense if you created and synced the camera angles like you normal would in a sequence and then create a multiclip from that sequence. Working like a nested sequence where at any time you could make changes to the parent sequence and it would update the multiclip.

To answer your question, you need to sync it both in a sequence and in the original clip. Then you would copy the audio tracks over to the sequence that has the multiclip. I just edited a performance as a multiclip and realized I needed to add back the individual layers of audio but can't because I made cuts so now the original audio can't be synced with the multiclip. So you have to sync them before making any cuts (removing footage).

Pete,
in Vegas I used to sync using the waveforms, maybe you could do it in FCP. Haven't tried it yet.

Also, used to check sync by panning one track left, the other right, then listening for match/no match. Guess that won't work here for Multiclip, but it might help for syncing the layered audio to the edited Multi.

Multiclip is easy with a few techniques. If you do not have TC synced between cameras (I nearly never do), find a common sync point and mark it in the master clip by pressing "M". There are two ways to find a sync point, something visually distinctive (hand movements, lights blinking), or even better, open the audio track and find an audio point on the waveform (vocals are the easiest but percussive sounds work great as well). If the sync point is before the important footage starts, you can set an "in" point there and create the multiclip. If the footage starts before the sync point, it's time to set an Auxiliary TC number under "Modify/Timecode". Pick an easy number like 1:00:00:00. When you create the multiclip just pick "Aux TC" instead of "in points".

Multiclip is strange in that it doesn't seem to have a pattern to which clip become "camera 1" and there is no way to assign it to the clips (Apple, please pay attention). Since I never need to switch Audio & Video at the same time, the active track function is always set to "Video Only". Sometimes I need to use an audio track from another camera so this is where putting a marker in the master clips really is helpful. Now you can drag that audio track in and align it's marker with the marker that's already in the video track of whichever camera you picked.

It orders them alphabetically by the clip's name. You can also change the angle field of the clip property if you don't want to change the name.

Where is that function?

right-click on the clip in the browser > item properties > Logging

this is great help - thank you for posting.

Here's my tip for syncing two or more cameras. I use this for weddings. Start both cameras and stand so both can see you and take a flash picture. The flash will show up on only one frame, and as long as neither camera is stopped, you can sync both reels by finding that frame on each.

good tip. in my particular situation i primarily shoot dance recitals and in this case a camera operator shooting the close ups stopped his camera between each dance so I had to resync them 12 times.