Tutorial: Multicam Editing in Apple FCP X, Part 1
Our Final Cut Pro X tutorial series continues with the first installment of a 3-part series on multicam editing in FCP X, addressing the basics like creating a multicam clip and cutting and switching audio and video using the Angle Editor.
Adding Another Angle
If you made a multi-camera clip and you forgot an angle--say, if you actually did a three-camera shoot, but initially created a multicam clip with only two angles--you don’t have to re-create it from scratch. See the little triangles to the right of the camera name in Figure 11 (below)? You can click one of those and choose Add Angle. This creates an empty angle into which you can drag a new piece of media.
Figure 11. Adding a camera angle
Now obviously, this new angle is not synced. You can sync it by clicking this triangle again, and choosing Sync Selection to Monitoring Angle (grayed out in Figure 11 because we hadn’t dropped in new media yet), then choose one of your existing angles to be the monitoring angle, and choose Sync Selection to Monitoring Angle. FCP X will analyze it, and slide it into sync. So you just added an additional angle. Also, if there is an angle that needs some color correction, you can actually do a global color correction to that angle as well.
So the Angle Editor is extremely powerful, and it’s probably one of the reasons why I feel like Final Cut Pro X’s implementation of multicam is so much better than any other that I’ve seen.
Editing the Multicam Clip
Now you’re ready to begin editing the multicamera clip. Move the cursor up into the Angle Viewer area, and you’ll notice that when you hover over one of the angles, your cursor becomes a blade icon (Figure 12, below). What that denotes is that when you click on it, it’s going to cut that particular angle.
Figure 12. The cursor becomes a blade icon.
There are two different types of edits you can do from here: a cut or a camera switch. If you simply click an angle, FCP X will cut to that particular angle. If you want to switch to a particular angle without making a bleed through your footage, hold down the Option key and click. When you toggle between holding down the Option key and not, you’ll notice the icon does not change. I don’t know if it’s a glitch, but it doesn’t show up until you move your cursor, so just bear in mind, if you hold the Option key, it will work, you just have to move your cursor, and the little finger icon will pop up indicating you’re ready for a camera switch.
In the upper left, you’ll see three icons (Figure 13, below). The first one denotes Video and Audio. The next one is Video Only, and the final one is Audio Only. These options define what is going to be cut or switched. By default it’s yellow, which is Video and Audio, so when we hit Play, and then if you cut, it’s cutting to the other angle and also cutting to that audio from that angle as well. So it’s cutting both.
Figure 13. Choosing what you will switch
With this project, we never intended to use on-camera audio. We recorded scratch audio only for purposes of syncing it to the Boom Mic audio that we recorded separately. For this reason we want our Boom Mic clip to be our primary audio, so we’ll choose Audio, and switch to the Boom Mic audio by holding down the Option key. When we click that, it switches the audio track for this entire multi-clip to pull from just the Boom Mic clip.
Now we want to go back to cutting our video, so we click Video Only, which means our edits will not going to affect the audio whatsoever. We can cut between the angles, and it’s not going affect the source of our audio.
To begin editing, hit play. We can click and change to another camera and back again and it just switches live. Later, if you go back and notice that you wanted to be on a different angle at a given time, you can actually switch the angle by hovering and holding down the Option key and switching that angle.
Finally, you can switch your cameras without even using the mouse. This is how I edit all the time. This is how I use multi-clips. I know it seems like such a simple implementation, but the ability to switch your angles using the number keys is brilliant. As the video plays, I keep my fingers hovering over 1, 2, and 3, depending on how many angles I have, and as I play, hit 1 to go to the first angle, 2 to go to the second, and so forth. Hold down the Option key and the number to switch instead of cut.
So those are the basics multicam editing in a nutshell. In the next tutorial, we’ll dive deeper into more complex multicam edits.
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