do you have any training books for the Multi cam mode?

I just want to simply take long dual cam wedding ceremony and receptions. see both cameras, set a default crossfade time and press 1 or 2 while I am preview both cams.

You can see a sample using an older version of Excalibur (version 3) here (Excalibur is now at version 4.6.2 and has a few more multi-cam features)

You can see a sample using Ultimate S 2 here.


NOTE: I also cannot give an unbiased comparison as I'm the author of Excalibur. Both are solid products with 15 day demos. Give them both a test spin.

does excalibur show your the preview?

Yes.

Multicam in Ultimate S is great. I don't do a ton of multicam but I feel now it works a bit smoother than Excaliber. I know there was an HD aspect issue with Excaliber that may or may not have been corrected if you do any HDV work.

very happy with it. again what jetdv said, try both, use both if you need.

mike

FWIW, if all you're doing is 2 cams...there is a free tool called DoubleTake
There are tutorials on the website for it. No where near as powerful as Ultimate S, but it's also free.

I do 2 cam edits of wedding ceremonies as well - DO NOT get UltimateS....unless you want to save yourself HOURS and HOURS of time. DuoCam is OK, but for the price of UltimateS, you're getting tons of valuable tools, many that do things for you where you go...."Vegas should have always had this..." as well as functions that you cannot get anywhere else.

A great timesaver. Period. Plus, Johnny and Spot are regular contributors here and other forums, support is generally excellent.

Excalibur is good; there is some overlap and you may eventually want both tools. For me, UltimateS is a better fit and I would recommend it as the first tool of choice.

David

Yeah I would advise heavily against going to Pinnacle for multicam editing. Vegas users have two very good programs at their disposal for this and much more.

I like the ability Excalibur gives you over the control of transitions (and transition locations...before, on, or after cursor).

Overall you'll find they are both very robust add-ons that give you even more than just multicam funtionality.

OKay just got home and immediately downloaded the doubletake free plugin.

Just what the doctor order except for one thing.

after about 3 minuets I forget what cam I am on (prg).

I am going to try the ultimate later.

BTW I saw some wedding library kits any stills on this product. now that I am shopping some of these other products look goood too.

So far excalibur I know this is super ficial but your site has too much text and gives me the sense that the product may not be as user friendly.

But great product both of you.... It is a wonder that this feature isn't in vegas already.

> after about 3 minuets I forget what cam I am on (prg).

You can certainly name the markers 1, 2, 1, 2, etc. if you’d like. Also DoubleTake always starts with Camera 1 and switches to Camera 2 when it sees the first marker. If you want it to start with Camera 2, just drop a marker at the start of the project. Since Vegas numbers its markers, if you drop the markers consecutively, odd numbered markers will be Camera 2 while even numbered markers will be Camera 1.

Maybe I should add a function that auto numbers the markers. So you would drop a bunch of markers, then when you get confused ;-) press auto-number, and it would name them Camera 1, Camera 2, Camera 1, Camera 2, etc. Just because we offer DoubleTake as Freeware doesn’t mean we won’t enhance it. These tools are meant to improve your productivity and if we can make them even easier to use, all the better for you. (not that I don't want you to buy Ultimate S) :)

~jr

Johnny, I use markers and the odd/even sequencing to keep me straight. Is it possible to make different colored markers? (not regions green). One color for the beat peaks, another for the valleys, one color for each camera, etc. Is this at all possible? Just a thought. John.

Unfortunately different colored markers are not possible but that is a great idea.

~jr

Okay now I have spent a few hours trying manyof your products and I would like to thank both of you guys for these awesome tools.

My style is general ussually dry. I use effects sparingly. I want the view to get into the story not my gimmics. So I have purposesly stayed away from fancy effects and tried to hone my shooting ability to think more like a photgrapher that shoots motion.

But the movie looks has peak my curiousity it especially looks nice with high def. I think its neat how you create a script using tools already in Vegas punch out an amazing effect.

I kinda fell in love with the water paint script. I put a white track underneath and decreased the opacity to 50% to give it a soft look. neat. I am thinking of creating a background for a menu with this.

Your marketing strategy is interesting. A person comes into your store to buy one product and finds many things of interest that they nrmally won't have bought.

Now I am interested to see what those wedding graphic animations are about. any stills on the site for a sample viewing. It is a little blind or a leap of faith of what it is.

I think it is great that you are willing to modify a already amazing frre plug. the auto number Idea would be perfect. To be honest double take is all I need. It is rare (for now) that I have more than 2 cams and quad cam slows the preview down to point of being anoying which means more investment in a faster videocard and system upgrades.

I also like the fact that double take is very simple. At my level I just want to get it done before the customers start getting mad. This is a great introduction to the rest of you products.

One thing is for sure your products are worth every penny.

You can view stills of the wedding GrafPaks here if you'd like to see a few stills from the series. Wayne Starick posted some motion graphics of them as well, but I don't have the link handy. You'll find links to the Worship GrafPaks on that page too.

Incidentally, the speed diff for DoubleTake and Quadcam vexes me. You should be seeing approximately the same performance between the two, since you've only got two tracks of vid happening there.
Glad you like the software. It's a lot of fun. Make sure you play with the PhotoMontage tool too, it's pretty sweet, IMO.

I personally suggest US2 (ultimate S2) but I'm kinda biased too - I've used it more than Excalibur and honestly I haven't used excalibur that much - I just bind my F1, F2, F3, and F4 keys to be the fade transition for cam 1,2,3, and 4 respectively. I've used Photomontage more than once - not like a whole long project, but sections of projects that need montages.

The Graf-Paks are great IMO - bias there cuz I contributed to them :) but still, I have to say that I like em.

Dave

Well t5o be fair When I testedit I was using 4 HD cam tracks and When I was using double Take I was actually working on a current project that was in NTSC which I completed in record time.

I went back to double take after reading the last post and found the obvious marker counter that I missed ealier with the odd and even numbers. Makes sense.

Do the wedding and animations come in HD resolution?

I kno that the SD files can be blown up/uprez but it would be nice if the animations displayed the full res of HD 16:9.

Much of the GrafPaks are made out of generated media, and those can be opened in an HD project with no problem, as the generated media can have the resolution of whatever the project is. Some of the lower thirds use graphics, albeit high resolution graphics, to generate the image, and in the ones that are significantly sized down, they may not look as strong as the generated media-only lower thirds. I've used most of the various thirds in HDV projects with no troubles, but I've not used the Wedding GrafPak in HD outside of testing them. Just open an HD project and use the demo thirds. You'll quickly see what's happening.

weddings and HD won't be worthwhile for a while anyways - no good delivery method at the moment. not to say that they won't do HD, just won't be a need for it for a while :)

Dave

Hi Dave, I am including WMV HD on DVD9 disks with the Regular DVD9, customers play them on their computers and soon can play them on Xbox 360($399), JVC SR DVD ($399) and IO data player also $399.00. When players are out for $399.00 or less HD is here.

But keeping thinking old school it just keeps my Hi -End edge ;^)

Hi everyone,

I am attempting to use the Duo-CAM feature in Ultimate-S for the first time. When I go to "Step 1", and try to select which camera will be Camera 1 or Camera 2, the drop down list is empty.

I am only using consumer level camcorders, I hope that will not prevent me from using this feature.

Here is how the capture was done: Camera 1 recording straight into Laptop1, attached to external USB drive 1. Files saved to ISC.veg

Camera 2 (B) recording straight into Laptop2, attached to external USB drive 2. Files saved to ISC-B.veg.

I can import all of the AVI files into one veg file, but I want to find out the correct procedure before doing so.

If anyone can offer some help to get me started, that would be great!

Thanks,

Colleen

> When I go to "Step 1", and try to select which camera will be Camera 1 or Camera 2, the drop down list is empty.

Did you name your tracks? (i.e., update the track label to be something other than blank) The camera drop downs in Duo-CAM list the track names. If the tracks aren’t named, these lists will be empty. Just press cancel and go name the tracks. Then they will show up in Duo-CAM.

~jr