Excalibur multi-cam: don't do what I did

JackW wrote on 6/17/2004, 12:22 AM
In the spirit of teaching and learning on the forum, here's something I did that seems obvious but wasn't, and which caused me no end of frustration.

The scene is midnight, on a wet and stormy night.

I've loaded the tapes from a two camera shoot into Vegas 4.0, synced up the audio and, going through the usual procedure prior to using Excalibur multi-cam wizard, I created a PnP file to use for cutting reference.

Now, as I begin inserting markers I realize that the tapes are slightly out of sync. So I slide the tape on track two slightly and -- nothing happens. The shots in the PnP don't change. So I slide some more. And some more. Still no change -- and still no sync. I tried again and again: no change.

After lots of cussing and a noticeable rise in blood pressure I go for a cup of coffee and think about what's going on. It finally dawns on me that the PnP is a rendered AVI file, and that nothing I did to the underlying tracks could change it. While this should have been obvious to me from the start, I let my frustration get in the way of solving the problem.

The solution: back to square one. Delete the PnP from the hard drive, sync the tapes, and render another AVI PnP.

The moral: thinking through to a solution beats butting heads with a problem and getting all bent out of shape by it.

Jack

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/17/2004, 3:27 AM
IMO, if it's only 2-4 cams, rendering a ref file is a waste of time. The way I'm showing it in the cities I've shown it, I'm using 3 cams live, using Track Motion with no rendered file.
Sucks when a simple, obvious problem isn't so obvious and simple when it comes to slowing you down. I've gotten into situations where I've repeatedly done the same dumb thing several times in a row, just trying to move more quickly through my first mistake, and then screwed it up worse because of the stress.