Any Final Cut Pro X experts? Help needed!

[bramley]

Hi,

I foolishly volunteered to video a school play. I used a 5D2 and a 7D, and a Zoom H4 audio recorder. The audio is approx one hour long and I have 53 (gulp) video clips. As each camera is concerned there are gaps in the footage but at least one camera was running at any given moment in time.

I have only used FCP X for very simple edits before so the idea of multicam and compound clips etc is new to me.

I'm struggling big time, and could do with some help getting all the synced clips and audio into a timeline correctly, and efficiently.

I've imported the footage with a keyword added hoping that may help FCPX separate one camera from another.

I've watched a few tutorials and began to get somewhere but as I'm a novice with FCPX I would be very grateful if someone could give me a few pointers. I've seen how to edit the multicam footage so that looks ok, it's just getting to the point where I'm ready to do that that I'm struggling with.

Thanks

[Disastrous]

Have you created a multicam clip form them all yet?

Assume you took sync audio on all cams as well as they master audio on the zoom, this is a piece of piss.

Hang on and I'll find a tutorial video that takes you through the whole process.

[Disastrous]

Think this describes your scenario near perfectly, albeit a shorter clip...

http://youtu.be/kmFmyXWaQHM


Basically, you just want to select everything in your event let FCP sync and see if it got it right.

It isn't perfect but if you run into bother, Pluraleyes works much better!

[bramley]

Thanks so much. Will study that link!

Do you think I should throw the whole lot at the multicam gadget or do it in batches?

[Disastrous]

My inclination would be to try it in 2 acts as I'm assuming you probably split the audio recording at the interval and you'll have two very visible cut points on the cameras.

If it all goes to hell, my plan B would be to use (I'm presuming you had one wide camera locked off and one closer?) the wide camera as my master and try and sync it to the audio and cut in camera B manually as and she it feels right to cut. It's a bit slower but quicker than trying to think in terms of two master cameras, IYSWIM.

[bramley]

That makes sense.

I've got the option of filming it again tonight which I'm going to take advantage of. Went again last night but it was interrupted by a problem with the music system. I've got better at knowing what's going on and when and technique is better so will should be worth the effort. Also the 7D is very noisy, I'm struggling to get a sharp picture from it, so I'm dropping the ISO and using a wide aperture lens - 5D2 isn't so bad. 7D will only be used as a backup when the 5D2 goes off. I'm also aiming to have fewer clips to work with.

Thanks so much for your help

[Disastrous]

No trouble at all

How long can the 7D record for again? Is it 12 minutes? It's the biggest limitation of SLRs IMO. We film quite a lot of events and tend to use a dedicated video camera (C100) as the master wide, and use an SLR for moving about, fancy DoF stuff but the C100 runs from start to finish and captures a safety master for us.

If you are running the cameras side by side and just using the 7D to cover the splits in takes from the other one, you might not even be worth multicam clipping it as it may get confused. Multicam tends to assume both cameras are getting the whole thing and has an editor window that lets you just vision mix between them as you play back.

It may work better to just mark on a stop watch what time you had to split takes on the main camera and cut them in manually as there shouldn't be too many.

Main thing is clean sound into both cameras as it makes sync so much easier!

Best of luck with it