Multicamera editing in Final Cut

I’m back at Final Cut.

After reading some stuff on film editing it sure is a lot easier to figure the software out. I guess it is true that this is professional software and it is not that easy to just take it up and start editing away…

Anyway I took it up again because I have an event filmed from which I want to make a DVD and I had access to two tapes from different people, both of which had some kind of problems with it so even if I wanted to (and I didn’t) I couldn’t just cop out and use only one of them for the whole event. Consumer-grade mini-DV cameras absolutely suck in low-light conditions

So I just read through the FCP manual where it regards to creating, manipulating and editing multiclips and then after I had all of the clips synchronized into different angles of the same clip I just edited it like one would a live show with multiple cameras’ signals coming in. It just rocks!

Of course, manually synching different video feeds when you have no strong visual or audio clues (like a clacker for example, which I now do get the need for, by the way…) is a pain and the only thing that made it easier on me was that fortunately one of the persons filming the event left the camera on for the whole duration so I had a continuos video feed to synch up the other person’s interrupted footage.

All in all I haven’t finished editing everything yet but the main event clip (the only one which is multi-angle) is coming along quite nicely indeed, even if I do only have a rough edit so far.

Which reminds me: making rough edits with highly reduced resolution footage and then re-importing everything at full res just for the final edit and export is just great! The speed with which I can now work is amazing and then I’ll just have to do minor tweaks with the full resolution footage. Heaven! :-)

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