2012-06-26

Multicam in Final Cut Pro X - lessons learned

Lessons learned regarding multicam editing in FCPX so far (regarding an efficient workflow):

Preparation:
  • Sync your camera+sound recorder clocks to the second before shooting. FC will do the syncing for you but this helps to identify clips that belong together.
  • If possible, also record the same clock simultanously. e.g. have a clock visible on a slate.  This way you can adjust any remaining timecode differences later.
  • For short, overlaping clips having one continous master recording is not needed but could help. A long sound recording to get some ambience is helpful anyway.
  • Too many compound clips and multicam clips make FCPX crash. ...very often and repeatable
  • Do color correction after all the edits especially with multicam clips. It slows down FCPX a great deal.
Importing SD cards:
  • Keep the SD cards in the cameras/sound recorders until that one card gets imported maintain the relationship between camera and clips on the card
  • Right after importing one card, tag all these clips with the name of the camera (and possibly also an "untagged" to find clips that need further tagging later)
  • Also set the camera-name (in the inspector) for these clips. These will become our track-names within the multicam clips.FCPX will use the volume name of the SD-card as default.
  • Tag clips that belong to multicam recordings as "multicam_input". This way you can find them between all the singlecam recordings
Syncing:
  •  Start from the top of the "multicam_input" collection and mark the clips for the first multicam clip.
  • For "camera assignment" (DE: "Kamera zuweisen") select "camera name". "auto" doesn't work and  "clip" creates a mess of tracks if you have multiple clips from one of the cameras.
  • FCPX will jump to the new multicam-clip. You'll loose your position in the Event Browser and the new clip will have no tags. Click that clip to quickly check. Unmatched clips are put at the beginning of the multicam clip.
  • Go back to "multicam_input", mark the clips you used, tag them "multicam_done" and then remove "multicam_input" from these clips. You can still see the clip-names in the timeline.

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