Lessons

Lesson Info

Multi-Camera Editing: Overview

Well we're gonna be talking about multi-cam or shooting multiple cameras, and then editing them more efficiently. Basically switching live as if you're in a studio, and it's a very efficient way of working with all of this media. Instead of having to do what we did in earlier lessons, where I was like trying to match my questions to his answer, to the cutaway. That's a traditional way of doing it, if you shoot maybe one camera, or old school if you don't know the multi-camera technique. But we're gonna learn that, and that's gonna save you an amazing amount of time, and really open up a lot of opportunities for you when you're taking footage that you shot, and need to put it together. So, that's a little bit about what multi-camera editing is. We're gonna go deeper. Definitely an interactive class. This is the one that I know a lot of people have a lot of questions about, so please pipe in. Because the questions again you ask, will really benefit the folks that are watching this lesson...

. Shooting tips, that's the big thing. It all goes back to shoot it right, it'll make your life easier afterwards, instead of doing the face palm going if only. We're gonna actually hop into the software at that point. I'm gonna show you how to create what's called a multi-camera sequence, which is aligning all of the different angles that you would have shot from your multiple cameras. And then we're gonna actually execute that by switching, as if we're in studio. And then some of the finalizing, and even show you that once you switch it, you can now levarage all the editorial and trimming techniques that we've already learned to refine that multi-cam edit. So it's a really fun session. It's one of those things that people are a little bit scared of, so they don't shoot multi-cam. But then once you do it once or twice, you go, "Wow, I have the tools. "This will make my life real easy." So with that, I really want to start this as a conversation before we get into the software, to kind of talk about some of the pre-pro. But let me throw it open to you all about if you have questions or concerns, or just how it works, and we can talk about the production side before we actually look at some of the footage. So are there questions? Excellent. Hello, I'm wondering if you shoot with different cameras, let's say an iPhone and an SLR, if you run into any issues? For example, if you have different depths of fields, and what are the things that you should be thinking about when you set up those cameras? That is a perfect opening question. So, yes, I often shoot with different cameras. Sometimes it's a necessity. Sometimes I do it as a luxury, and I find out that it benefits me. So getting down to the main thing. Let's say you're doing an iPhone. Maybe you have a DSLR. Maybe you have an older DSLR. Can you use all these different cameras? Absolutely. What are the issues involved? Well the first thing is, you should ideally shoot all the video at the same frame size if you can. So, if they could all shoot 1920X1080, try to do that, because that way you don't have to scale anything up. You can scale down if you have a camera that shoots 4K, you can always transcode it down to 1920. As a matter of fact, when we look at this footage, one of the cameras I did shoot at 4K, at four times the resolution, and I ended up using it as if it was two cameras, two angles. I used it as a wide shot in a close up, and it's very easy to do in Premiere. So that's one thing to keep in mind, is the frame size. If one of your cameras can only shoot 720p, that's the 1280X720 size, you need to make a decision. Do you want to scale that up to match everything else? Or do you want to scale everything else down? I would still shoot everything at the highest quality that camera can shoot. Each camera can shoot. But then I need to decide, is my sequence going to be 720, or maybe do I wanna compromise a little bit, and probably I would still stick with 1920, and use the skills we learned about set to frame size, and scale it up. So that's the first thing, and of course aspect ratio, let's stick with 16X9 if we can. Because an SDM will not help you. So that's the first thing. The second thing is frame rate, and we've talked about frame rate. And frame rate, it's confusing because I make some suggestions. I made some suggestions, and people were like, "Well, does that mean 24 is better? "Does that mean 30 is better?" the bottom line is, (mumbles), Premiere will try to fix it no matter what. So don't bang your head on your keyboard. If you go, "Oh my gosh, I did this at 24, this is 30. "my life is ruined." It'll figure it out. But if you can control it, try to get the frame rates to match on all your capture devices. So for instance, if you know that one of them could only capture 30 frames per second, and the other ones at 24 or 30, do them both at 30. Because that way, you don't have to force the program to do any more analysis, and everything will merge together smoother. So that's one of the key things. As for look and depth of field, even when you're shooting with multiple cameras. If they were all exactly the same. If your focal length is different, your depth of field is gonna change. And that's not as critical, because we're used to when we switch cameras, that the background is gonna be a little different. So for instance, if I was being shot as a multi-camera, imagine this is a multi-camera set. Wait, it is. But, if we have a camera positioned over here. My background is this board, it's dark. But if we have that arching camera over here, my background is light. Well, and your brain says, "Well That's not "gonna match, but it does match." Because we've set the stage of the set, and people are used to the fact that backgrounds change. As long as my shirt like doesn't change color, it's gonna work. And as a matter of act, you can google or search the web. It's interesting how we used that term Google, like just that search now. For videos where they intentionally change things between cuts, and people don't notice. There's a great one where two newscasters, and literally you watch the video. And then at the end, they show you the behind the scenes. And they're like changing shirts, and the table and the backdrop, but it seems so smooth our brains fill in 90 percent of what's there, and we focus on the story. So it's not as big of an issue. Where you might see a little bit of differentiation with the diversity of cameras, is the quality of the image. And the color balance of the image. So, if one of your cameras just shoots a lot softer, if it doesn't necessarily have the quality, you might notice when you cut to that camera. Or maybe the way the color balances with the gamma, the black levels. Maybe a little more crushed, and you might need to do a little color correction to balance them. So, the objective is that hopefuLly they'll all be balanced right, or if you can control the white balance, try to compare them. But for the most part, you can mix them. I have successfully mixed multiple brands, Sony, Canon, and Nikon in the same shoot. As well as iPhone and iPad video, and Go Pro video. Go Pro was, I mean it worked great. We actually have a Go Pro camera here. It stands out because of the distortion and what not. But it was something that people accept. As a matter of fact, I always like to hang a Go Pro as a behind the scenes when I'm cutting something, because it's a great emergency camera that I don't have to look at lips move, and I can always cut to it as an emergency. And the audience is accepting of that now. So don't let the thought that I don't have matching cameras, I don't have the same level of cameras. If you have something that can record video, and you want to get as many angles as possible. Go ahead and set it up. Get a little tripod for your iPhone. Get a little tripod for your iPad. You know, I say tripod because you want things to be nice and static. So use whatever you have, and you should be able to make it match. And premiere is very, very flexible on merging all of those cameras. And one thing I didn't mention is, it's also very flexible on merging all different formats. So we had talked about codecs and wrappers and all that, don't worry about that. It doesn't care what codec. It's codec independent. So you can just bring it all together and it works. And that's the beauty of it. It's easy and it just works. Well let me bring up some workflows that you should follow. So in an ideal situation, you should record audio on every device that you can. And I say that because the ideal way to sync up your cameras is using the sound that you record. The audio waveforms. So even if you're not gonna use that sound from that camera, Premiere can use that sound to align it with all the other cameras that you're recording. And then you can choose which camera has the best sound, and use the sound from the best camera. And the other one, you don't have to worry about. It's very similar to, we learned in an earlier lesson, we merged the audio that was good audio, with camera audio. This is just taking it to the next step. You're merging good audio with multiple cameras, and that good audio could be recorded separately on an audio recording device, like a zoom. Or a zoom h4n, or I actually have used iPhones, older iPhones. I've got microphones for them, and that was a wireless mic. I wasn't wireless. I put it in the person's pocket, clipped on the lavalier, hit record on the phone, and then I just emailed myself the audio file. And there's a lot of third party applications that you can download for phones, that give you much more control then the native voiceover, or notes application. And I've gotten some great sound from these iPhones that is old iPhone 4, and I don't have to worry about wireless. The person can be standing 20 feet away, and I'm getting real clear audio, and I can sync it up. So it's being able to open yourself up to trying new things. And you can really get some cool stuff leveraging multi-cam. So without more questions, but we're gonna get some more questions, let's open up Premiere. Take a look at what we have, start putting it together. And as we go through, if you think of production questions, it's not too late to ask those. And of course as we continue to go through, hopefully you'll be as excited with this as you have been with the other cool features that we have discovered within Premiere. So this is a project, I've already imported the video. Because you don't need to see me do that again. As a matter of fact, we're using the Mike Hagan interview that he and I did, as well as some of that footage. So it's pretty standard. But what we're doing here, is I have all the cameras I through into a folder, okay? We recorded this with three cameras, even though we have four. It looks like four. We had a master camera, which was a Canon C300, just so people can know what it was, because it recorded at a slightly different format. That .mxf format. So there's one flavor. Of course, all of this was recorded at 1920X1080, 30 frames per second. Except all of it wasn't, because one camera was recorded at ultra high definition 4K, and I actually turned that into two cameras. That was actually turned into camera two and three, the over the shoulder shot for the 4K. And then the camera three just close up. I just zoomed in because I had such high resolution, so I had actually a cutting camera. Now for those folks who have downloaded, who have bought the course and are downloading the media. I did convert this all to .mp4, so it's smaller and easier for you to download. You didn't want to download a 60 gigabyte file. So if you don't see that it says mxf, or that it's 4K, I've kind of pre-baked it so you can enjoy the multi-cam experience, versus dealing with all these different footages, which it would naturally anyway. So, those are the, we had that one camera that recorded 4K. It was actually a little camera, and then the third camera was just a Canon 5D. Again, a different flavor, different format, different lens, Yet, we're gonna blend them all together. And then we also recorded the audio separately on a zoom h4n, which is a little pocket recorder that you can buy, just as a backup. So I have all of this flexibility, and I'm gonna merge this together. You do notice that they word 29.97, that is an ideal. I also have gone in, and I have renamed the cameras for convenience. So that when I switch to them or look at them, I know what they are. Instead of whatever the camera name was. And so, you can do that either before you ingest it, you can change the name of the original media. Or once you ingest any file, you can click on it, and when you click on it, you can rename it. So I could change this from ST00 to DSS, dual system sound audio. You know, it's just another way of identifying it. And this doesn't change the name of the original file. It's a database, that's all Premiere really is. It now knows that this name goes to that original named file. We already did project management in a previous lesson. And if you can recall, there was a checkbox that when you manage a project and copy media, you can choose to rename the copy media, based on the names you changed here. So that's just a nice little technique that if you wanna go, and while you're editing, rename clips, and then when you media manage it, you can go ahead and have them be named exactly what they're, you know, describing what you're shooting. So when you go back, it's easy to find, instead of ST0001. So those are the pieces of media that we'll be working with.