How to cut between a couple of cameras that were shooting at the same time, and stay in sync.
There are times when you may have shot an event (such as a wedding or a sporting event) and had two or more cameras filming at the same time. In these situations you don't really want to have to keep manually trying to tweak the in and out points of each source clip to maintain sync with the preceeding shot (...trust me, I've had to do a 5 camera motor racing shoot that way on another NLE system and its not fun!!). The following technique is an easier way of doing things, since you only have to sync the camera clips at the start of the program, and after that you just have to make your decisions as to where to cut next (a much nicer way to work).
- Firstly grab in the source clips in the biggest duration chunks you can and label them (e.g. WeddingCamera1clip1, or some such name that will be useful)
- Set up a video track and an audio track on the timeline for each camera plus one extra video and audio track which we are going to use as temporary master tracks (sometimes you might want to just have one master audio track, ...for instance if you were shooting a rock concert and one of the cameras has a feed from the main mixing desk, you'd just use that as your main soundtrack and only use vision from the other cameras). We are going to use a 2 camera shoot for this example, so in this case we set up 3 video tracks and audio tracks
- Dump each camera source clip to one video track (and audio track) each (if you have long clips that you've had to split up, assemble each clip one after the other from that camera onto a single video track making sure the cuts are seemless, so that sync can be maintained for the duration of the programme).
- Slide the video track (and audio track) of the second camera until it is in sync with the other one (this is the tricky bit, ...using the audio tracks of each camera can be very handy for getting things in sync at this stage, but a bit of experimentation is the best way to find out the best technique to use for the particular project your trying to sync up, ....if you had more than two cameras you would sync each clip up in turn).
- First thing to do is decide which camera shot is going to be our first shot, ...this means clicking the EYE icon of each camera (video) track in turn and watching the footage down to see which shot is best. Once we have decided that, park the timeline indicator on the first frame you want to start the program with and use Force Edit (keyboard shortcut COMMAND / (command and slash key together)) to "slice" through the camera clip at that point.
- Go to the point in the timeline where you want that camera shot to cut to the other camera and again use the Force Edit Command to slice the clip at that point
- Go back to where we made the in point cut on the camera clip and set and In point on the timeline (F1)
- Drag the video portion of that camera clip which we just cut (the new segmented piece we created by using the force edit command) onto the unoccupied video track we have left on the timeline (drag it so that it stays in sync with where it had been in the other track, ....setting the In point on the timeline should allow it to snap to the spot quite easily). Also if you are making up a new audio master track you would want to drag the audio portion of the cut camera clip onto the vacant audio track you are using for a master track.
- Now click the eye icon on the other camera shot you wish to go to, find an out point and use force edit to make a cut.
- Drag this clip down to our temprorary master video track (it should snap happily to the end of our last cut and be in sync still).
- Then go to the next camera clip you want to go to and repeat the process, finding an out point, using force edit and draging the clip into the temperary master video track.
- Work your way through the whole programme in this way and you should be fine (as long as you are careful not to drag any of the camera clips out of their original sync that is). After roughly cutting everything together in this way you can then use Trim mode for a perfect cut and add transitions. When you are done, disable rendering from all but our temperary master video and audio tracks (i.e. the red dot next to V1, V2, V3, etc should only be active for our temprorary master video track, ...in our 2 camera example that would be V3, .....our V1 and V2 tracks would have greyed out dots), and Overwrite VP and AP tracks, before outputting to tape.
