Cutting a 14-Camera Music Video in FCP X
Drummer Micah Hummel at The Nash
The Shoot
Saturday morning we all converged on the facility… twenty or so volunteers, fourteen cameras (seven DSLRs and seven GoPros) and five musicians.
I built my initial camera plot around four primary manned DSLRs (the blue ovals on the plot at right), positioned in a rough arc aimed at the band. Monitor lines from these cameras to video village would let me direct them to avoid getting stuck with four simultaneous medium shots of the same player at the same time.
To add a more active view, we had one stabilizer-mounted “Rover” DSLR to grab behind the scenes shots and interesting angles.
We recorded two original compositions created by the band members, each played through two times for a total of four recorded performances. One thing I learned from this project, is how quickly multi-cam chews through storage! Just making the initial hard drive backup disk images of the fourteen 32GB cards we shot onto a pair of laptops kept us on set almost four hours after the wrap.
Above: “Rover” operator Randy Raish (left); Tech. Dir. Daniel Gheorgiu adjusts one of seven GoPros.
The background processing of such a huge mass of footage meant my edit machine, a pre-thunderbolt MacBook Pro i7, had to do a lot of transcoding over the days directly after the initial shoot. The whole process really made me appreciate the software engineers at Apple for building FCP X around a “go ahead and work while the housekeeping stuff is happening in the background” model. That approach let me do the work I needed to do in project organization and even actual edit decision-making while the file preparation was still happening under the hood.
Above: Frank Salle, our lead GoPro rigger.
The Edit
When I sat down with FCP-X to figure out my editing strategy, I initially thought I’d have to go through the entire six hours plus of performance footage, applying keywords to everything. And, honestly, I completely wasted a day or two on that approach.
While I understand that spending time in X’s Event Browser doing keyword application is one of the most powerful parts of the program, for a live performance situation like my multi-cam shoot, it’s really just an unnecessary optional step.
Unless you are building an archive of performances so you can go back at a later date and pull out clips by an instrument or some other tag, significant keywording isn’t particularly valuable for a “real time” post-switch.
What was important to me was to sort all my shots into four simple “buckets.” I picked a simple four-character tag where S1T1 would indicate the the clip belonged to Song 1 Take 1, and so forth. That’s really all the tagging that was needed to let me isolate each song for multi-cam post switching.
Above:The Song/Take tags in the FCP X Event Browser
I did initially worry that FCP X would bog down with fifteen tracks (video plus audio) in multi-cam view, but with FCP X’s built in proxy workflow, the program was able to display and switch all fourteen cameras plus my master audio track without missing a beat.
The only real problem turned out to be that while FCP X was fine managing fifteen tracks of content, my brain wasn’t nearly as agile! Try as I might, I just couldn’t monitor fourteen images and feel like I was making the best possible shot choices in real time. There was simply too much visual data to monitor at once, particularly with five of those cameras always in motion seeking better shots.
Above:The 16-camera shot view in FCP X’s Angle Viewer (12 in use in this capture).
Thankfully, FCP X is extremely flexible in letting you approach the same task in different ways, so after lots of trial and error, I started using a “divide and conquer” strategy for knowing where and when to focus my attention. The key was not to watch everything at once, but instead to focus on my primary four cameras to see which of those shots were the most critical at any point in the performance. With a few virtual rehearsals, I was able to build a first switch out of my selected primaries — then to refine the resulting base edit by adding alternate shots and tweaking choices on subsequent passes.
The Results
In the end, FCP X turned out to be an absolutely excellent tool for a project like this.
Above: A wider capture of the FCPX angle viewer with the final eight of twelve camera tracks shown.
Its real-time proxies let me import footage and get to work fast. The multi-cam tools were critical to be able to view and choose (or restrict!) my focus on some or all of my cameras. And I was able to cut an extremely complex project down to manageable size in just a few days.
If you haven’t yet spent much time editing in FCP X, I’d caution you not try to download it and immediately attempt to cut a complex project on it, regardless of how experienced an editor you might be. As has been discussed extensively in the professional video editing community, FCP-X operates quite a bit differently from most other editing software.
But once you do come to understand that it’s unique new tool set, you’ll start to see how its database orientation and many timeline strengths help make not just editing, but organizing and re-arranging a complex project like mine a lot easier than you might expect.
Above: A still shot mid-recording.
I took on this project because I look around and see a world where quality cameras are becoming less expensive and more available — and I wanted to see if FCP-X’s new multi-cam capabilities were a good fit for today’s new “cameras everywhere” reality. The answer for me was a clear and convincing “absolutely.”
When all was said and done, FCP X really helped me create order out of the natural chaos of a complex project like this multi-cam music shoot. It let me easily see, judge, manipulate, organize, correct and edit my way through fourteen cameras times four performances with way more agility and efficiency than I had expected.
In the end, I came away convinced that while my shoot was all about Jazz, using FCP-X for the edit really rocked.
One of the performance videos is posted here: https://vimeo.com/newvideoaz/review/51502778/0b24537119
About the Author
Bill Davis owns and operates NewVideo, a production studio in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on corporate video projects. During his 20 year career in the visual arts, he’s been in demand as a voice talent, videographer, script writer, and producer. He became one of the earliest adopters of Final Cut Pro in 1999, and spent a decade as a featured writer and Contributing Editor at Videomaker Magazine.
He is also the creator of StartEditingNow! — a unique modern turnkey editing instruction curriculum that ships with professionally shot, fully rights-cleared “multi-track movie” content for classroom editing instruction in middle schools, high schools and universities.
