Multicamming in SE

M

Mutley Eugenius

New member
I've done loads of multicam edits in Speededit - No plug ins required. Here's how I do it.

1) If I have 4 cameras, I sync them by overlaying them and all using a transparency of alpha 128 and find some distinctive frame like a camera flash or a hand going up to the highest point or a drum hit or something, then just Ctrl-< or > to line them up with eachother.

2) Then I have 4 presets which I perform (bottom left, bottom right...) - each preset is just a positioning and scaling that moves each camera to 50% size, and then to a different corner of the screen, and when you're done you have camera 1 at the top left, camera 2 to top right, etc. Also the preset has alphas at full to put all the clips back to full alpha, no transparency.

3) Then I select all the tracks and play the video, and I watch all the angles. Sometimes I watch it at half speed to see all the angles together. When I want to cut to another camera, I press 'c' as it's playing. This makes a cut on all 4 cameras because they're all selected, and after the cut, SE automatically selects the same 4 clips after the cut, ready for the next cut. I keep doing this for a while, then I go back. This is the way I do the entire edit on the show.

4) I go back to each segment and I delete all the 3 camera angles that I don't want leaving the quarter that I do want. When you watch it, the image keeps jumping around the screen with each cut, until you use the final preset...

5) Select all the clips that remain (the ones you wanted & didn't delete), and perform a single preset that puts them all back to center position at 100% size.

You're done. You can also leave 2 clips with good footage on the timeline at the same time and make one half transparent, giving you that antique lovesong look... whatever you want.
 
T

travisr

Multimedia Magician
Mutley Eugenius said:
I've done loads of multicam edits in Speededit - No plug ins required. Here's how I do it.

1) If I have 4 cameras, I sync them by overlaying them and all using a transparency of alpha 128 and find some distinctive frame like a camera flash or a hand going up to the highest point or a drum hit or something, then just Ctrl-< or > to line them up with eachother.

2) Then I have 4 presets which I perform (bottom left, bottom right...) - each preset is just a positioning and scaling that moves each camera to 50% size, and then to a different corner of the screen, and when you're done you have camera 1 at the top left, camera 2 to top right, etc. Also the preset has alphas at full to put all the clips back to full alpha, no transparency.

3) Then I select all the tracks and play the video, and I watch all the angles. Sometimes I watch it at half speed to see all the angles together. When I want to cut to another camera, I press 'c' as it's playing. This makes a cut on all 4 cameras because they're all selected, and after the cut, SE automatically selects the same 4 clips after the cut, ready for the next cut. I keep doing this for a while, then I go back. This is the way I do the entire edit on the show.

4) I go back to each segment and I delete all the 3 camera angles that I don't want leaving the quarter that I do want. When you watch it, the image keeps jumping around the screen with each cut, until you use the final preset...

5) Select all the clips that remain (the ones you wanted & didn't delete), and perform a single preset that puts them all back to center position at 100% size.

You're done. You can also leave 2 clips with good footage on the timeline at the same time and make one half transparent, giving you that antique lovesong look... whatever you want.
Click to expand...

This is a good idea... slower than what I'm used to, but practical for the time being. Thanks!
 
M

Mutley Eugenius

New member
And for my next trick...

There is a way to speed this up, if you're working in HD.

Render the files as lower res versions before you do this, and then load the low res versions into the timeline for this editing process. SE will work much faster on many platforms with files that are fraction of the size of an HD file. You don't often need the really high res originals to edit like this.

Then, later, you can use the spreadsheet to replace all the cut up files with the or you can do a really smart fast cheating method this way:

1) load all the original footage into a directory called COPIES then make a low res render of each one into a directory called ORIGINALS. Load the copies from the ORIGINALS file onto the timeline to do the Multicam Edit. When you're done, close the project, rename the ORIGINALS directory as LOWRES COPIES, and rename COPIES as ORIGINALS. Then reload the project. It will 'find' all the files and load the project normally but it will load the good stuff instead in all the right places. SE doesn't care as long as it finds it. If you haven't done any scale or position keyframing, it'll all look right. Any keyframes will have to be adjusted as they don't translate properly to the higher size files.

Then you can archive the stuff properly, with the HD Originals in the newly named ORIGINALS directory, and the Low res stuff in the LOWRES COPIES directory, which you can delete or keep.
 
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