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Multi-Camera Editing: Creating A Sequence

Now I'm going to select just the four cameras first. Cause I wanna explain the difference because you may not always be recording this wild audio. Though I do recommend, if you have any option to do that, it never hurts to have options. Cameras don't get plugged in and whatnot. As a matter of fact, if you have an old phone, you can buy expensive mics, even a $20 Lavalier, I've gotten great audio from that just plugs right into the headphone jack. There's even other ones that plug right into the lightning port. Great stuff, it's very cool. So I will go with that, but we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna merge these clips, and I wanna show you one thing we did before, so I'm gonna open up the clip and Mike and I are talking at the very beginning, and make sure they have good audio, okay. And I'll bring those full frame by hitting the tilda key. This is how exciting it is before an interview. There we go, this is what I want. So what I do here is, I do, this is a human clapboard. Okay, it...

allows me the luxury of if for some reason one of my cameras didn't record, I have a visual of when my hand slapped together, or if I'm in a situation where maybe one of the cameras really isn't recording the audio loud enough for it to sync up by the audio waves, I can actually mark a point, and I'll zoom in right here, where that impulse sound is, and I can align everything, by that clap. So it's a good backup, we actually ended up not needing it, but I do it as a rule of thumb. Another thing to keep in mind, in the old days, five years ago, if you wanted to sync up cameras, the rule of thumb was once you start rolling, don't turn the camera off, because then you only have to align all your cameras once and you're good to go. If you turn them off, then you need to align them as they turn on and off and on and off. With being able to sync by wave form, that's less of an issue. These apps are pretty clever. But if you can keep them rolling, you add some extra footage, it's less brain power for the computer, less likely that you're gonna have one camera that it can't quite find the other ones. Rarely is that an issue, but I wanted to bring that up as a point. The other I want to bring up, because some folks might have come from other editing programs or might have been in the industry for a while, there is something called timecode. Timecode, when we traditionally have recorded things on broadcast cameras, it would put meta data time stamp, not on the actual image but underneath in the digital part of time of day. You sync it to time of day, and it's again, it's 23 hours, 10 minutes, five seconds, four frames, and you could sync up your cameras based upon that time of day. The camera gets synced to an atomic clock, and then you can sync up the cameras that way. Now, what's interesting is I've shot with iPads and iPhones, and when you do that, and I believe I'm remembering this correctly after what, 15 lessons, is that it does have the date and time stamp when you recorded that. So you can actually sync by date and time, if you can't see the audio or hear the audio, you would hear the audio. Something you recorded from a great distance, a wide shot, if there was no mic. So there's a lot of things that you can sync up to but primarily, the clap, or we're gonna use audio wave forms. If you want to use one of those really cool clapboards that you see in the movies, you can download an app for your phone between $1 and $5 and you just hold it up, to all the cameras, and it actually will have the time of the day, and you'll see a little flash, and you can do that to the flash. I think it does make a click sound, but you can have a digital clapboard. Okay, so with that I'm gonna go ahead and shrink this down again, and we're gonna go ahead and if you notice in all of these, there is, if I look at the audio, I do do that clap at the beginning, but I'm not even gonna worry about marking it, because we're not gonna use that, we're gonna make it easy. I'm gonna select the four cameras, and I do recommend, if you've numbered them, to organize them, you should number your master camera as one, you can rearrange all this stuff afterwards but why make extra work. Premiere tends to create the order of the cameras by the order that you select these. So, it's kind of, if I clicked from the bottom up, camera four then shift click to the top, it would think I went four, three, two, one, and then when I make the multi cam camera four will appear in the upper left corner. I can switch that around, but it's just, it tries to order things by the order you selected them. So if I selected, four, two, one, three, it would try to put it in that order. The good thing is if you haven't really aimed your camera, it's a good way to preorganize your clips. So let me select this the proper way. One, through four. I'm going to now right click on these clips, I've selected all four, and there's an option that says create a multicam source sequence. So what it's going to do, it's going to merge these together and create one clip that basically has all four of these clips inside. Okay, not creating new media, just creating a new way we look at the media. The other thing to keep in mind when you're starting to do multicam, and this references some of the questions we had earlier on in the course, is that when you're doing multicam, off a hard drive, it is reading four streams of video at the same time. So this is an instant where if you have a slower drive, or if you have really big bandwidth files, you might get a little bit of stuttering. Now four really should not be an issue. But you could do nine, you could do a lot of cameras. And it'll sink it up. And the more cameras, the more demand on your hard drive and your bandwidth, so that's where you start seeing some of that issues with dropped frames. And so the decision is either get a faster drive or remember and I'll show this as soon as we bring this in, remember how we can change the viewing resolution in both our source and our program monitor? You may want to cut that from one half to one quarter. And you'll find that you have smoother playback. Most of the time, I never even see these issues unless I really have lots, like nine angles or something. But I do want to point that out because we do have a lot of different environments. So I'm gonna say create multicam sequence, I'm gonna get this great little dialog box that will look kind of confusing to you at first, but don't worry, because you're gonna be, you're gonna own this in 10 minutes. The first thing is how do you wanna name this new clip? You can leave it at the default. If you leave it at the default, it'll name it after the clips name, one of the clips name, the primary clip name, and then it'll throw multi cam. You can change that however you want. You can name it after the audio file, maybe you've renamed the audio file, the name of the interview. This is the least of the things you need to worry about. I'll leave that at the default. This is where really I wanna talk about stuff. So, I indicated that it can sync through multiple options. You can mark inpoints, wherever that clap was. So if for some reason it isn't syncing up and you have created a sync point, and that sync point could be the clap, if you didn't do it, maybe you're at a concert, it could be a camera flash, or a wedding. You're getting close, you see that this is where a picture was taken, from three angles, and you get that flash, that's a momentary instant that you can just put an inpoint so it's visual and link it up to that inpoint. On the flip side, if you forget to do any kind of a clapboard, you could actually mark an outpoint and it'll just use that as a reference. Maybe at the end of the interview, go I forgot to do a clap. Make that an outpoint. All it needs is a common point, that's why either one of these and you can always adjust it, and then I'll just go through these and I'll take that question. Timecode, if there is timecode, it's an option. If it doesn't see timecode, it won't even let you do it. So don't worry, unless you're doing broadcast, actually let me add to this. If you're using timecode, one of the cool things it can do is because it's using this time of day actually it's free run, it'll actually not only make the clip but it'll put it in the time line because if the camera is turned off for 20 minutes, it just leaves a big blank space. The broadcast marker is basically the same thing as a inner now, you put a marker on the clap point, it can sync, so this is what this is all about, but I'll tell you, probably even greater than 99% of the time, I just leave it as audio. And I'll explain that but I wanna take this question first. So if for some reason you were in a position where you had to use inpoints or outpoints, would you have to go onto every single camera and every single piece of audio and figure out for yourself what that inpoint and outpoint is and mark that before you go into this? Yes. So just to clarify the question and my response, if you don't have good audio, do you have to do it to every single one. Absolutely, because that's what you're connecting it by, which is why it goes back to if you let all the cameras roll you only have to do it once on each one of the pieces of media. So, even with this, with four cameras, I find one common point, whether it's a noise, whether it's a flash, whether it's just an action, I've had situations where I'm just kinda watching, and as soon as I see somebody's hand reach the apex of raising it, I say that's my inpoint. All you're gonna do is find one common action or point and mark your in and the same thing with audio, now sometimes you have to listen. Because you don't have a visual representation there, but you can do it. So yes, you sometimes have to do it if you're gonna use the inpoint. And you have to do it in all of it otherwise it will just skip that clip, it won't be able to align it. Okay? So, we selected audio, we have a couple of choices here, what the basic choices are, do I want to use the audio that was recorded on channel one of my video, do I wanna use the audio that was quoted on channel two of my video, sometimes you might not have audio on a certain track, you just didn't record it, so you want to point it in the right direction. Sometimes you might have different audio on each channel. Maybe you had the Lavalier on one, and you just had wild room sound on two, say oh use one, because it's gonna be easier. I have found that it's pretty successful to mix both channels together, and figure it out. Okay, so I usually leave it to mix down, it's more bullet proof. This is if the original video was out of sync with the audio on the recording. Usually that's if you're in a studio when there's a slight delay, or if you're recording maybe from the backup of a concert hall and you're dealing with the echo and the delay with lip sync. Again, keep it simple. This is where you start making decisions that will affect you and remember, it's all non destructive, so if you mess up, you can just hit undo, or you can delete the new clip that you made and try it again. And this is something that you'll probably end up doing and wanna do to see how it works with different settings. So this is saying how am I going to wanna handle the audio between all of my cameras? So if I have a primary camera, and when I record I try to put the best audio on my primary camera. Depending on the complexity of the shoot, you can sometimes have people, the audio guys can run the same audio to all your cameras, in which case it's not an issue. So, I'm saying, you know what, my best audio is on camera one. I'm gonna probably end up switching my video but I'll probably wanna keep the audio on one consistent so that I don't have to worry about level changes and quality changes. But that's not always the case for some environments. There might be a situation, and we're actually gonna create a sequence with all of these choices so you can see what the result is, but if I switched to all cameras, that gives me the option to see all of my audio tracks at the same time on my sequence, so when I switch my video, maybe I want to cut the video, to maybe I'm doing a hockey game and I cut to the crowd, and I want to be able to use the sound of the crowd cheering, but then maybe I still wanna use the primary camera of the actual sound from the ice or maybe people talking, giving the play by plays. So it lets me kind of blend the sound of the different cameras if they're getting very unique audio. Maybe it's a situation where you're doing a wedding. And the groom is miked on one camera who's ever performing the service has a mic, and they really don't pick each other up, so maybe you do wanna be able to switch between the mic on the officiant and the mic on the groom is also probably picking up the audio from the bride. Because the bride's not gonna let you mic her because she's worried about everything else. As she should, she's in charge. So, that's what all cameras define. It gives you options while you're editing. Again, all this you can change, switch audio says I already know that when I switch video, I want the audio on that camera to go with it. Maybe all the audio was recorded clean on each camera, and you just don't even wanna think about having to modify it afterwards, you say when I cut to that camera, I wanna hear that camera. When I cut to this camera, I wanna hear that camera, okay? And depending on how you shoot and depending on what you're cutting, you will find that these things are valuable for different purposes. And I think it'll become a little more clear when I create the sequence and you can see how these multi cam clips look once you place them in the timeline. So we're gonna leave that on one, and I generally leave this on automatic, it bases it on the clips. This basically says I'm gonna be creating a clip, how do you want me to create the clip's audio, is it mono, is it stereo, is it gonna be surround sound? If you leave it on automatic, it will base it basically on the way you recorded the audio in the cameras. And I have found that always works smoother than when I play with it and I end up making the wrong decision and I go back and go into automatic and it is way smarter than me usually when I am tired. So again, leave it to the default. And then you can choose how you want the cameras named. This is subjective, do you wanna number them, enumerate them, do you wanna just use the track name where it is track one, two, three, or the clip name, again, I leave this to the default, cause it still has the camera number as well as the source clip name, so those are the basic settings. And I kinda went through them, but there we go. It's no other settings there. I'm gonna go ahead and hit okay. There should be one setting here that I know should be here. Inpoint? Oh no it'll do this when I hit okay. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit okay. (mumbles) So there was a check box somewhere, and I'm gonna be doing this again so it doesn't matter, but when you make a multi cam sequence, there is a check box that says, when I do this, do you want me to take off all those cameras and then put them in another folder? So that it doesn't distract me from maybe the other multi cam stuff I need to make next? Maybe you have lots of stuff, so it organizes it into a folder called processed clips. If you uncheck it, it just leaves it where it is. So it's a nice rule of thumb, they're all there. It just helps organize the structure, and this is what it has created. It has created camera one master, so it took that first camera, let me go ahead and stretch this out so you can see it, and it named it after the camera through multi cam on there. And I want you to see the icon. That's the icon that is created. That is the icon for a multi camera clip. Okay, we saw earlier that the icon for any kind of a sequence or timeline looks similar, but things are not aligned. So that's a sequence, the other's a clip, and the reason it's nice and clean on the side because basically it is, if I clicked on this to load this into my source monitor, what you see is one box. And you're going, well why do I only see one box. Well this camera was rolling first. As I go through and play it, as the other cameras came online because we're linking with the audio, they're all lining up. And probably at the end, as a matter of fact, the 4K camera turned off after five minutes because it heats up, so then I was dropping down to two. But I'm gonna go back here, if I hit play, so you can see that my lips and his lips are in sync on all four of these cameras. This was the master, the C300, these two shots were from the 4K, okay so there's the wide shot I had, and then I pushed in to the closeup. And actually I pushed it in a little more than 100% because my head kept popping in. And it still maintained resolution, you can blow things up a little bit, it's digital. And then I had the iso camera on me. So I really have a lot to choose from here, okay. And it took the clean audio from one. So I'm gonna go ahead and take this and I'm gonna make this into a sequence, I'm gonna put this in a sequence. I could go ahead and mark my in and out points at the beginning, so I could go back here, and wait till we actually start talking. Which is the proper way to do it. I'm relatively lazy, so what I do is I simply right click on it and I'm gonna say make a new sequence from this clip. This is something that we've done with just a single clip right, and it puts it in and formats the sequence just right, same thing, make a sequence from a clip. It's gonna name it after the camera master, and it just looks like a regular piece of video. There's my good audio, and when I do that, if I zoom out, we see now the primary camera in here, and this looks like clip, what just happened to my magic. You had to switch a couple of selections to go into that multi camera editing mode. So now I have a great sequence, I'm ready to start switching, I am done for the time being with what's in my source monitor. Now move that out of the way. I wanna focus what's happening here. So, I'm ready to do a multi camera edit. We've already synced the clips, we brought the clips into a new timeline, that we created from the clip itself. It was named after the clip of course, you could go ahead and change that name if you want, and if you by the way if you do wanna change the name of a sequence after you created it and you don't remember exactly where it was, you can right click on it and say reveal in finder. Reveal sequence in projects, sorry not reveal in finder. It'll actually find it in your bins and you can rename it very easily. But we're not talking about that now.