Quick question about 2 cameras in CS5
 

I'm going to be editing many many hours of footage from two cameras.

I'd like to put both of the videos in the time line, sync them up, and then have an easy way (such as a keystroke) to switch back and forth between cameras.

Is there a way to do this in Premiere? I'm trying to decide which editor to get.

Yes, PPro allows you to do multi-cam with up to 4 cameras. There are several options for how to synch the cameras. CS4 had some performance issues in multi-cam, but haven't really seen complaints about CS5. I haven't done a multi-cam timeline for a while, so can't comment on CS5 multi-cam from personal experience.

CS5 can manage 3 AVCHD streams from an internal hard drive - not a RAID on my not too powerful PC. 2 should be no problem really.

Multi-cam is done by syncing your two cameras up in the sequence window as usual. Then, create a new sequence, and drag the first sequence (with the two synced cameras) into it. Highlight the track and right click - select enable multicam. Then in the window drop down, select the multicam monitor.

A window opens with output monitor on the right, and the source tracks on the left. Enable the record button and press play. use the numeric keys 1 and 2 to do the cutting between cameras.

When you have done, you can go back and using the edit tools, shift any edit points you got wrong/didn't like.
Simples!

I actually find it easier, with four cams, to just click on the shot I want with the mouse. You can always go back and change it later.

So the only option is editing it in real-time, and then going back later and fixing it up? Or is it possible to go through the timeline more slowly to choose the edit points?

Like launching an ICBM sideways, you could, but why would you want to?

The interface was designed to mimic live event switching, which is how multicam editing has always traditionally been done. If you don't do it in realtime, you can't get a sense of how it flows and when the cuts are appropriate.

But if you must do it this way, I suppose you could just drag the CTI slowly through the footage and cut that way, rather than pushing the Play button. But try the regular way first -- it's easy and even fun. And it's a very simple matter to adjust the cuts by using the Rolling Edit tool.

My experience is it takes most of a day to log, rename and sync up all my raw footage, but very little time to do the actual rough cut: real time, obviously, so an hour per hour of show. The real work comes in before and after.

It's really a different paradigm and mindset than single camera cinema style editing. Think Monday Night Football rather than Citizen Kane.

Note that while Premiere is limited to four cams at a time, FCP can to 16 (God help us!) and Edius can do 8.

Does FCP work the same way with the switching between cams and live editing?

I'm trying to figure out which one to get.

I've used Premiere quite a bit, and I really hated it because there was no automation, so it ended up taking weeks of doing the same thing manually over and over, instead of hours, and it would randomly freeze quite often.

I ended up gatting Camtasia Studio the next time I had to do that job, which turned it from a nightmare to almost no work at all.

FCP and Premiere work similarly. I personally found the multicam in Premiere to be much easier than in FCP, but others have different opinions.

Not sure what you mean about no automation in Premiere and what type of tasks you are trying to automate. Stability is an issue for many, but CS3 started to behave better for me when I added tons more RAM, and CS5 has been fine in that regard.

Not familiar with Camtasia. Does it do multicam?

Edius gets rave reviews for most everything. I've installed it but haven't used it yet. Seems like the editing steps are similar to Premiere, just based on reading the voluminous manual.

Well the current version of Premiere is CS5 which only works on 64 bit machines. I'm not sure if you can still buy CS4?

When you say automation, what do you mean. What do you want to automate?

General concensus is that Adobe users like Adobe, and FCP users think the same about their system - mainly because of familiarity. I'm quick with Adobe products because I've been using them for years and I don't have to relearn from scratch, which I would do if I went for FCP now.

John:

What I think you were asking is if you can use CS5 to display both video tracks alongside each other and pick you edits while sliding/pulling your cursor through the timeline and hitting a keystroke to switch views.

The answer is yes. Premiere gives you the option to do that or the live switching the others have described. ,

For either kind of switching views, you basically you have a hand over the number keys on the top line of the keyboard and tap the number for the track you want to switch to as you play the timeline or scroll through it.

I use both methods and choose the one that is best suited to what I'm editing. When I've got only two (or three) tracks of a project such as a seminar or symposium, and with some weddings, I find it much, much faster to use the scrolling method. I use the mouse in my right hand to pull/scroll the cursor along the timeline while watching the multi-cam display and when I see a cut point --- say when my main cam is zooming in or out or swinging over to catch a questioner in the audience --- I tap the tap the number 2 (or 3 or 4) with my left hand to switch over to a b-roll cam, then scroll a bit further and hit # 1 again when I see the main cam settle down.

On the other hand, with things like stage performances where I need to listen closely to musicians or to dialog cues, I'm more likely to use the "live switching" method. You basically play the time line and tap the # 1, 2 or whatever as though switching in a control booth.

Once I've made the basic edits, it is easy to go back through the timeline and adjust cuts when needed. You simply pull each cut's end-point to the right or left as needed (say, to match it better with beats in music --- often easily discerned in the waveforms on the audio tracks --- or changes in speaker or lead singer or whatever.) Unfortunately, Premiere does not let you move the end points jointly; you have to move them separately for each clip on each side of the cut. (Maybe that's what you meant by automation?)

If you are a very mouse-centric person, you can do all of the above with the mouse, too, if you want to. Some people swear by mouse clicks and others swear at them. It is personal preference. From your questions, I think you have figured out that keystroke switching selections will be faster.

Edius works pretty much the same way except that you can have more muti-cam tracks displayed at one time (Premiere limits you to four.) I believe Ron Evans has a posting within the last several months describing muti-cam editing with Edius 5, so you might try searching on his name and the topic as well as checking out the Edius downloadable trial version.

Sure it does; just use the Rolling Edit tool (two arrows pointing each way in the Toolbox). You slide the cut to the left or right and while one clip shrinks, the other expands to fill the space.

some tutorials and resources about multicam editing in Premiere Pro
 

There are some tutorials and resources for multicam editing in Premiere Pro here.

Let me know if anything isn't clear.

Camtasia is a screen recorder. Originally, I had to put thousands of still images on the timeline one at a time. What I really needed was a way to open a numbered series of powerpoint slide images, and put them on the timeline, and switch from one to the next with one keystroke while playing a timeline live, basically the same as I'm trying to do with two cameras. I couldn't figure out how to do this in Premiere, so I got Camtasia and recorded the lecturer's screen while he was talking. I went from horrendously laborious editing to none at all.

Of course, I had to set the screen resolution to the capture resolution I needed (720x480) and since no LCD I have supports that, I had to drag out a big old CRT monitor, and I still ended up with squashed pixels because Windows is a piece of $%&* and can't deal with non-square pixels.

I'm posting because, while I'm working on a different project now, it's massive, and I'm trying to figure out whether Premiere or Final Cut has a better workflow for dealing with about 80 hours of AVCHD being edited to about 40 hours and output onto DVD and BlueRay masters with menuing.

It's usually pretty easy to do a given thing in any piece of software, but if you're doing it thousands or tens of thousands of times, the little things become important.

For example, If it takes 15 seconds to back up and fix a slightly-mistimed cut with one package, and only 5 seconds with the other, I'll probly choose the 5-seconds one and live with any other problems it has.

I'm really trying to find out about all the little things, including importing, editing, transcoding, and mastering, which make Premiere or Final Cut better.

A well-written piece of software should be flexible enough to do pretty much anything, but very little of it is these days.

John
I can't vouch for FCP, but fixing a mistimed cut in PPro is as quick as your hands are.
I've done many projects that were cut to music and it's not a big deal at all.
I've also done projects that incorporated Power Point slides. The major issue was getting the images from Power Point to the correct video format for the project. Once the satisfactory conversion was accomplished, the actual editing was straightforward. PPro will certainly handle a variety of pixel aspect ratios as well. CS5 will allow you to mix not only different PAR, but different formats as well, on a single timeline sequence and will interpret them correctly for playback and rendering.
IMO, your use of Camtasia sounds like a case of finding exactly the right software for the particular job, maybe not really an NLE issue.
Also, rumor has it ( maybe started by Adobe???) that since CS5's release, many FCP users are complaining that Apple is not supporting FCP development as it used to.
Typically, you can download trial versions of the various NLEs and try them yourself. The problem is that some of the trial versions are not full featured, plus there is such a learning curve with each one, it's hard to know if it's a valid test or not.
Good luck...

Thanks Adam. I'd forgotten that.