This week’s MacBreak Studio requires a bit of a backstory. At the end of January, Steve Martin and I taught some sessions at Vlog University, a conference designed and hosted by Justine Ezarik (iJustine) and produced by FMC for YouTubers looking to up their game held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The week before, Filmic Pro’s DoubleTake app was released. This app lets you shoot with two of your iPhone’s cameras simultaneously, as a combined single file, like a side-by-side view or picture-in-picture, or as separate files. While there, we built a simple rig that held two iPhone 11 Pros at 90 degrees to each other, stacked on top of each other, so that we could shoot 4 orthogonal angles at the same time. Justine and her sister Jenna were kind and generous enough to do an experimental shoot with our little rig. We took the footage in Final Cut Pro X, and with some expert help from Chris Fenwick, quickly built a multicam clip that contained not just the 4 separate camera angles, but also a quad-split view of all of us. In the airport, I added two more split views to the multicam clip. You can see the resulting video from that shoot here.
What we have above is Steve’s excellent description of how you can quickly create a quad-split angle in a multicam clip for any project (hint: compound clips are your friend). It shows off Final Cut Pro’s incredibly flexibility and ease of use in a quite elegant way and if you have any interest in Final Cut whatsoever, I suggest you check it out. The project is a simplified version of what we ended up doing (no border overlay, resizing and repositioning of clips, color correct) but the core concepts are all there and clearly articulated. Let us know what you think.