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25 Camera Angles in 25 Minutes

Multicamera Editing in Final Cut Pro X

By Mark Spencer | February 05, 2012

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Steve Martin (Ripple Training) and I just completed a tutorial on multi-camera editing for the Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3 update. In that tutorial, we used 5 camera angles from a 5-camera music video greenscreen shoot we produced, plus two other angles: one for clean audio, one for some motion graphics.

But we actually had more material than that. A lot more. We had 5 good takes of a particular song, each shot with 5 cameras - so 25 total creative options to choose from. What if I wanted to build an edit using all of these at once? Could I edit what was essentially a 25-camera shoot?

It turns out that it's incredibly fast and easy to do in FCP X.

Here's how I did it.

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Comments

Craig Seeman: | February, 06, 2012

I apologize but I’m a bit confused. If you did 5 separate takes, wouldn’t the time between the slate and the start of the song differ between takes?

I can see how you can sync the angles of an individual take with a slate but can’t see how you can do that with 5 different takes with slate. On the other hand if you used the same sound (playing to a recording) I can see using the audio as a sync point.

Can you explain how slate on 5 different takes lined up?

Mark Spencer: | February, 06, 2012

The MovieSlate application starts the recorded song for your an exact time after the clapper that you determine - we used 15 seconds to give enough time for the camera operators to reframe the shots, but 10 seconds would have been enough. That’s the great thing about that app, it ensures exact sync for the start of the song every time.

Craig Seeman: | February, 06, 2012

I didn’t realize Movie Slate could time start the music playback. Very impressive. I thought it simply the iOS equivalent of a manual clapboard. Those not familiar with it (like myself) may not realize it from the article. It would be good to add that point.

Mark Spencer: | February, 06, 2012

“We used an iPad app called MovieSlate to record this common sync point and to also cue the music track.”

Check it out, great app - although it was a little buggy and the reflective screen of the iPad made it hard to read from the iPhone cameras. There’s an in-app purchase that allows you to sync over WiFi as well.

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