i used to have senior moments too, but it's all one long one now......

;-)

Ain't that the truth !! I can seriously relate to the "one long one now" :-)

mikey

Here I was, ready to post a clever reply, but I can't remember what it was about....

We were talking about...er...um...time for my nap.

"I forgot to create the Multicam Track."

I was going to mention that last night, but I forgot . . .

Very timely - I only do one or two multicam projects a year, but I shot one with four cams last night.

I generally use the built-in Multicam, but I have Excalibur, which has the very good ability to render a PIP view to, say, standard DV, so that previewing and decision making can be done with full frames per second.

The four cams I had were EX1 (mxf) Z1 (HDV) Zoom Q3 HD (mov) and a Panasonic AVCHD cam, so there's no way I'd expect Vegas to preview those four together smoothly, so I'm rendering a PIP DV avi.

As Excalibur and similar script based apps use functions that are already in Vegas, I was wondering why it doesn't appear to be possible to do this with the built-in Multicam tool. Anyone know why?

Peter

Vegas Multi allows me to click directly on the Preview Screen to select a camera. I like that.

Grazie

Yes, so do I Grazie, but the widescreen DV avi I've just rendered with Excalibur (took 5 hours!!) gives a real time preview of all cams, and it would be good if Vegas Multi would allow that.

Peter

Right, that's very important not to forget.

Grazie

I have the four lower buttons of my Shuttle-Pro mapped to select the cameras as viewed on the selection screen. Makes for extremely fast and convenient workflow.

bsb - great use of Shuttle Pro buttons - sounds like you're using built-in Multicamera, or can you do this with Excalibur?

Peter,

After you make the multicam preview file, can you still select the cameras using this file?

Dave T2

Good question!

Grazie

Yes good question Dave, and there could be more than one answer. I don't think I can directly use this Rendered DV avi preview to select cameras .... but,

in Excalibur, I'm not sure - be interested to hear - maybe use M for Marker, then type in Cam number?
and if I use this DV avi with Vegas Multicam, I plan to Pause, then Mute that track and either click on Preview Screen or use number pad to select new camera.

I expect there are other ways, which please tell us about ...

For me, that ability to time my cuts with real time preview, especially with a musical performance, is a big priority. Trial and error will eventually get there but realtime means I can do it sometimes without stopping - "go with the flow".

Excalibur will render out the multi-cam view to a new file so that you can get smoother playback (i.e. it doesn't have to read four (or even more) streams to generate the preview - only one is needed. Excalibur has it's own buttons for camera selection so, no, you cannot click directly on the preview screen. Camera selections CAN be assigned to keypresses which can be assigned to a shuttle pro, though.

Thanks Edward - that's exactly what I was hoping to hear - I have my multicam avi rendered for that very purpose. I now to need to work out which buttons/keypresses for Cam selection in Excalibur ...