MacMost Now 669: Final Cut Pro Multicam Editing

With the 10.0.3 update of Final Cut Pro X you can now use multiple camera angles of the same scene. Final Cut Pro will use timecodes or audio to sync two or more videos and then you can switch fluidly between these shots.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. In today's episode, let me show you how to use the new multicam support in Final Cut Pro. So a great new feature in Final Cut Pro 10.0.3 is multicam support. This means you can have different angles. Imagine two cameras filming the same thing at the same time, and then being able to edit in Final Cut where you can go between the two cameras and everything syncs perfectly. Now the cool thing is, you don't have to have all these professional cameras with time codes and everything in them, you can just use any old camera. So I'm going to use my regular camera that I'm filming with now, and also my IPhone's camera, record the same thing from two different angles at the same time and then use Final Cut Pro to switch between them. OK, so the first thing I'm going to do is to import the videos I've created, and I'm going to import one that's called IPhone Camera and one that's called Main Camera into an existing event here, and now I've got these two video files. Now, to say that these are both basically two angles of the same shot, I'm going to select them both and control and click and create a new multicam clip. Now I've got lots of manual settings here and different things I can do, but in this case I'm just going to do automatic and this will look for time codes, it will look for audio syncing, all sorts of things and it will get it just perfect with this example. Now I've got this new multicam clip right here. Now you can see here, as I scrub over it, I have the preview on the right, and then I have the different angles here, just because I have switched this on to show angle viewer, normally it would just look like that. So I can see all the angles here, and you know what, I could have up to 16 of these, so you can have a bunch of different shots. Of course the common example is shooting a wedding and having a whole bunch of people with different cameras shooting the wedding from different angles and then you could bring them in, say for the moment the vows are given, you can actually have everything put together in one multicam clip. Now I can, after I've dragged this to the timeline here, I can actually control click on it and go to switch the active video or audio angle and you can switch the entire clip, but probably what you want to do is actually be able to switch fluidly between them and the way that you do that is to use this multicam viewer over here, I can scrub around in the video and let's go to this part here where I point at the other camera and I'm actually then going to go up here and I can click on the second view, and that will switch to the second view. Then I'm going to move forward a little bit in time and nice and fluidly switch back to this view over here. Now as I play the video back, I can see in the preview. Now I can decide whether I want both the video and audio to switch or just have the video switch and leave it on the same audio. So in this case I may have actually wanted just the video to switch, since the audio for the main camera is a lot better than the secondary camera, so I could have done that and set the switch right here and set it right here and go back. Now for longer segments, one of the cool things you can do is you can do this on the fly, so I can actually hit the spacebar to play back and as it's playing back I can click on which camera I want, so I'll just do that and start and click, switch the video angle. I can switch back and I can continue to do that. And I should also add one of the other cool things you can do is you can drop transitions right on these switches here, so I can for instance drop this flip transition right here and then I'll get a flip in the middle of this cut so, as I play it back, it kind of creates a new effect there and you can do a lot with this. So this is really exciting because this is just the kind of feature you'd expect from Final Cut Pro and they make it so easy that really anybody can use this. You got a couple of friends with IPhones, you can just take a bunch of video at different angles and very quickly edit it all together and make a nice final product. And there's a lot more to it too, so there's a lot more detail, a lot of adjustments that you could make, so check it out if you use Final Cut Pro. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 669: Final Cut Pro Multicam Editing

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