If you have more than one camera,
shooting the same scene from 2 or more angles,
has a number of benefits.
It can help you show your viewers exactly
what you want them to see,
help you hide jump cuts,
make your edit more engaging, and much more.
And Final Cut Pro makes it very easy
to sync and edit multiple angles right in your timeline.
Today, we’ll take a look at how to film,
organize, and edit multi-cam clips in Final Cut Pro.
Before you start filming your scene,
there’s a few things you need to consider and plan out.
The most important thing, is make sure all your sources have audio.
This audio will be used to precisely sync all your clips,
so if it’s possible, make sure you have audio recording turned on.
It doesn’t have to be good audio,
so you can use your camera’s internal mic,
just make sure it’s recording.
If you shoot more than one take,
it can also be helpful to either say the take number at the start,
or even write it on a piece of paper and hold it up in front of each camera,
to help you identify all the clips from the same take.
And, this goes without saying,
but make sure all your camera’s are recording at the same time.
You don’t have to start recording on all at the exact same time,
just make sure when your scene starts, all camera’s are rolling.
For my example, I have a few takes of a product unboxing video,
shot using three cameras and an audio recorder.
I have my main camera,
one camera off to the side,
an overhead cam, for which I just used my iPhone,
and a shotgun mic connected to an audio recorder
for my good audio,
so four sources for this one take.
Before you sync your clips and start editing,
I find it’s very helpful to organize and label your clips.
You don’t need to do this step,
but this can save you quite a bit of time later on in your project.
What I like to do, is rename all my clips,
and use the angle description and take number as the name of the clip.
After importing into Final Cut Pro,
I also like to assign an angle number,
and the name of the camera to each clip.
For this, Command click all the clips from your main camera,
open the inspector window, and at the bottom,
where it says basic, open the dropdown menu,
and change this to extended.
Since this is my main angle,
I’ll assign angle one to all these clips,
and the camera they were shot on.
Repeat this step for each individual angle.
We’re now ready to sync all our clips,
and Final Cut Pro makes this very simple to do.
Command click on all the angles from Take 1,
right click on any of the selected clips,
and select New Multi-cam Clip.
In the popup window,
make sure this Use Audio for Synchronization checkbox is selected,
and click OK.
Final Cut Pro will synchronize all your selected clips,
and combine them all into one Multi-cam clip,
marked with this multi-cam icon in the top left corner.
And even though it looks just like one clip,
if you double click it to open it in your timeline,
you can see all 4 of your selected clips
are inside this multi-cam clip, kinda like a compound clip.
Let’s add this clip to our project,
and take a look at how to edit a multi-cam clip.
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To see all your available angles,
from the menu bar select View,
Show in Viewer, and Angles,
or use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command 7.
I also usually close the media browser,
just to give myself a bit more space.
From the settings dropdown menu,
you can choose the number of angles to display in this window,
overlay timecode over each clip,
or whether to display the angle number, clip name or neither.
Over on the left side, you have the switching icons.
Every time you switch to a different angle,
you can switch both your video and your audio,
video only, or audio only.
Most of the time, you want your audio to be consistent throughout the project,
so you normally pic your audio source,
and only switch video angles.
So, move your playhead to the start of your clip,
select audio switching and choose your audio source.
Next, select video only switching,
and choose your starting angle.
Down in your timeline,
you can edit this multi-cam clip just like a normal clip,
except there’s one difference,
and we’ll talk about it in a little bit here.
For now, let’s trim all the extra stuff from the start of the clip,
and take a look at how to switch from one camera angle to another one.
Move your playhead to where you want to switch angles,
and in the viewer, select the angle you want to switch to.
Final Cut Pro blades your clip,
and switches the clip after the cut to your selected angle.
Another way to switch angles, is by manually blading your clip.
With the skimmer over the frame where you want to switch angles,
blade your clip,
right click it,
and choose the active video or audio angle.
The third, and probably easiest way to switch between angles,
is by using keyboard shortcuts.
Each angle number is assigned to the same number on your keyboard.
So, to switch back to angle one,
just press one on your keyboard,
and your clip cuts to that angle wherever your skimmer is.
You can do this in real time, by playing your clip,
and just using keyboard shortcuts
to switch angles as your clip plays back.
To fine tune exactly where the cut takes place,
hover over any of the cuts,
and your cursor changes to a slip trim icon.
Click and drag to position this cut exactly where you need it,
or if you switched ages by mistake,
just select the cut, and press Delete to remove it.
But, because you can slip trim exactly where your cut takes place,
if you need to trim off a part of a clip,
you can’t ripple trim these clips by dragging one of the end handles.
If you need to cut out a part of your clip,
you either have to blade it and delete,
or use the Option Left or Option right bracket shortcut keys.
That’s the only real difference between editing a normal clip
and a Multi-cam clip in your timeline.
One last thing I did want to mention about editing Multi-cam clips,
is having quite a few streams of compressed video in the same clip,
trying to play it back and edit at the same time,
can slow down your machine quite a bit.
To help with this, by default, Final Cut Pro is set to transcode
your multi-cam clips to optimized media.
This helps with the editing part,
but can take up quite a bit of drive space.
To turn this default setting off, go the the preferences window,
select Playback settings, and uncheck this box right here.
This will save you hard drive space,
but can make your machine struggle quite a bit,
especially if you have lots of angles.
It’s a bit of a trade off between performance,
and storage space.
So that’s the basics of Multi-cam editing in Final Cut Pro.
Fairly straightforward,
and so much easier than trying to layer each angle on top of each other,
and trying to keep them all in sync.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you back here next week.