Pseudo-Multicam - Does anyone do this?
 

I was shooting a performance for a friend and this "really great" idea popped into my head. I shot the whole thing in HDV with a Canon XHA1, and not having any other cameras, I wondered if i could produce a mulitcam look, so I layered two tracks in FCP, then zoomed one to 200%. Cut between them and moved the zoomed track around for close ups. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out- low light I know, but overall, pretty acceptable for a first shot at it. If you look really close, you can see an iRiver ifp890 with a Giant Squid mic poking up on the edge of center stage.

Has anyone else had any luck with this sort of thing? I seemed to run into problems with focus and low light, but what if there was sufficient light? Does anyone know a better way to do this?

http://www.vimeo.com/1008696

I think it looks great on the Vimeo file. Does it look that good when played from a standard-def DVD?

I do this in PPro. Shoot in HDV, edit in SD. Use a downconverted, (via the camera), DV file for the wide shot and the HDV for the CU's. I'm not really blowing up the HDV in the SD project, it's already much larger than the SD frame. That's how the 'CU' shots stay clean. Are you actually 'blowing up' your footage by 200% or using a technique similar to mine?

Also, how realtime is your editing, and what system, software version, etc. are you using? I'm doing this on a Macbook, under bootcamp, because mixed format editng on FCP 5 is really slow and awkward. But I'm lookng for a solution to be able to what I believe were talking about at realtime speeds, w/o buying a Mac or Macbook Pro, or on the other side, w/o buying a Matrox system.

Thanks for the comment Adam, yeah, it looks pretty good on DVD actually, I was happy with it for being so spur of the moment!

Eric, you bring up a good point. I imported the footage as HDV into FCP 6 on a first generation MBP. Then I immediately converted the HDV file to a ProRes422 1080x1440 format (mostly for increased editing speed). After that, I edited the ProRes footage on a 1080x1440 timeline. That's where you got me.

It makes a lot more sense to do the project in an SD timeline, then the footage isn't being blown up. I was editing all HD footage on an HD timeline, so that means the footage is being blown up - bad. Then I exported to DVD Studio Pro. Looks good, but I bet it would look better your way on an SD timeline. Thanks for the comment, I'll definitely try it the next time I do something like that.

Concerning the system, I've found things to be MUCH faster using the ProRes422 codecs. Just convert everything to it right away. I don't have any Matox systems or anything, but the editing is very bearable in my (limited) experience with the ProRes.

Theoretically, FCP Studio 2 won't run on my computer, with its intel graphics chip. Though they said that about FCP 5 and Motion, which does run on my Macbook just fine, just a little slowly. Apple is really leveraging their beefier hardware. FWIW, I can run Edius, on the same Macbook under Bootcamp & WinXP, and run HDV with scaling and an effect, in realtime. I'm seeing if ProRes might help my situation on the Mac forum.

You have a macbook? I take it first generation intel? Well, the two guys I do work with have standard, base model macbooks, and FCS2 runs pretty well on their systems. We regularly do 3-4 camera DV multi-cam editing, and there are never any problems. I don't get what apple is talking about, everything runs fine for us. Don't take my word on it, but the graphics chips have never seemed to hinder us. Prores really puts a lot less strain on the system, I truly recommend it- especially with HDV.

I can try to do a test in the next couple of days to see what kind of performance a Macbook can do with HD ProRes. Try to get back to you maybe thursday or so, when I see them next.

Nate, thanks. In the meantime, I'm trying NewTeks' Speed Edit on the WinXp side to see how that does.

It is interesting how Apple really tries to distance the pro market from the Macbooks. If I'd had the money, I'd probably would have gone with the Pro, it does give you more options, both w/graphics ram and the xtra ports. But what a price difference!

Importing HDV in a SD project in Vegas, PProCS3 and using motion to pan and zoom with keyframes around the HDV image into a 16x9 SD size works quite will . Just don't zoom beyond the pixel size of SD and focus of the HDV image is VERY critical. Edius will also do this with the Layout tool but is not keyframeable within a clip. I have used this to shoot a show with one fixed FX1 camera full stage and then created what looked like a multicam shoot using Vegas complete with pans and zooms.

Ron Evans

Ron, nice to see you on another board. I'm going to try NewTek's Speed Edit on Thursday, let you know if that does the trick in realtime.

Sorry for the late reply:

As far as I've used it, in just simple editing, HD ProRes is workable on a macbook - probably better on one with a C2Duo.