MULTICAM EDITING USING TAKES

sturm wrote on 1/20/2004, 7:25 AM
I’ve been thinking of ways to improve multicam editing with vegas using TAKES and came up with a workflow that seems ideal, but pretty elaborate, so I’m curious if a script could be written for it.

Let’s say there are four camera’s and one DAT track. During recording everything was synced with a clapperboard. To edit I first make a LIBRARY-project with the tracks (Video and Audio):

MASTER
CAM1
CAM2
CAM3
CAM4
DAT

I import the clips in the appropriate tracks (not using MASTER yet) and synchronize them manually using the wave-peaks of the clapperboard. On every scene I put a timeline-region.starting with the clap and ending when the recording-take stopped

Now for the part that I’d like scripted:
I copy CAM1 to MASTER
I select the region 1 in the Timeline (the first scene), rightclick on the clip within that region on CAM2 and open it in the trimmer, right-drag the selection (Video and Audio) from the trimmer to the clip in the Mastertrack and choose Add As Takes. Then I do the same for clip 3 and 4. Finally I add the DAT selection as an Audiotake to the masterclip in the same way.
Then I go on to the next region and do the same thing until all regions are done.
Here the script ends.

I now have all the material as grouped-clips (as they call it in Avid I think) on the mastertrack. Selecting all the audio from the master and pressing "T" a few times I can make sure that MasterAudio is allways the DAT.
Using TrackMotion I make CAM1 appear upper-left, CAM2 upper-right, Cam3 down-left, and CAM4 down-right, so I can view them all in one. By soloing or muting the Mastertrack I can view a clip full-frame.
To edit I mute and select the masterclip and press Play. If I want to make a cut I simply press S. After that I select the newmade portions of the Masterclip one by one and assign them the right video-takes using the T button. These pre-edited portions can be copied to another project to edit further.

As you may have gathered I am not much of a scriptwriter in any sense that is useful here, but in normal language it would have to go something like:

Copy track CAM1 to the Master-Track
For every region:
-------select the region
-------find the clip on the Mastertrack within the selected region
-------for every videotrack except the Mastertrack:
------------find the clip within the selected region
------------select the part of the clip that falls within that region (Video and Audio)
------------add it to the clip on the Mastertrack as Takes
--------find the DAT-clip within the selected region
--------select the part of the clip that falls within that region (only Audio off course)
--------add it to the clip on the Mastertrack as Take
End of script.

Hope this makes sense. If anyone has a hint on how to write that script, I’d be delighted.

Comments

Tom Pauncz wrote on 1/21/2004, 10:17 AM
Hi,
Check out Excalibur here:
"Excalibur"
It has a multi-cam feature which may do what you need.
Cheers,
Tom
sturm wrote on 1/23/2004, 10:05 AM
It's not enough.
My message started a long thread on creativecow:
http://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?postid=107458274748295&forumid=24
I think it finally came across, what I meant.
sturm wrote on 1/23/2004, 10:06 AM
And it took a while. Peter Wright wrote:

I think the penny has dropped now - it's for "normal" editing, where you have to extract usable pieces of material and place them in whatever order you decide, with the additional feature that the material was shot simultaneously on two or more cameras and the material is first stacked as takes before being shuffled to its desired position.