Jacob, this thread is about shooting footage with multiple cameras simutaneously, and switching from one to another.

ahh ok srry then

Any Thing New in Vegas 7 on the Multi Cam Front ?
 

I am messing with PPro 2.0's Multi Cam function, and I also now have Vegas 7. Is there anything new on the multi camera editing front in 7 ?

Multi-cam in Vegas 7 is the same as in Vegas 6.

FCP 5.1.2 beats it all day

My brief experience with multicam in FCP was an exercise in frustration. A real pain to set up, with lots of very counter-intuitive steps. Once set up, it worked OK. But then it was back to pain-ville to prep the next sequence.

I suppose a power-user of FCP would get past those setup frustrations and on to the editing quickly. Glad it works for you.

That's been typical of my experience with FCP - amazing functionality that's hard to get to, difficult work flow. Again, power users probably do really better, but there's still all those clicks to do simple tasks.

For what it's worth. I find the multi-cam editing in PP2 really simple and nowhere near as difficult as described here - most of my work is using this feature and based around music events. quickest workflow after trying it all ways I could think of is to do a number at a time - then once each one's done - combine these into the finished product. Working with very big files does slow things down quite a bit. I'm quite happy with the performance.

that's why two different magazines have chosen Vegas with plugs and Premiere Pro over FCP's multicam. ;-P

It really boils down to what you're used to. If you can roll fast in one app vs another, it's probably the one to stick with. There are certain things I can do very fast in Avid Xpress HD and other things I can do really fast in Vegas. Vegas with one of the multicam plugs is the fastest overall for me, but that's me. YMMV.
the ability to switch on the fly/live between cams regardless of how many cams you have is super sweet. Building the master track takes around 5 seconds once I've selected my camera I/O points.
I've got a 234 monitor, so it allows me to comfortably see unreasonable numbers of cameras. Most I've ever done for "real world" use is 19, but most of the time it's 4-6 cams. All real time, all the time, usually HDV or HD these days. The fact that I can do multicam with all three US resolutions at the same time is a monster benefit. AFAIK, only Vegas can correctly do this. SD, 720p, and 1080i on the same master track, with all those cams set up to feed the master is very fast and intuitive.
Paul, glad to hear you can work with big files in PP2. I can't do it with large files or HDV; my system crashes whenever I attempt to do multicam with long files.