Just wanted to send some appreciation your way. I've now edited 3 music videos for my band and I use this video as my bible each time. Thanks for making such a user friendly video. It's great!
Jason, I was pulling my hair out trying to sort out Final Cut Pro x -- then I found your extremely informative, extremely 'to the point' video and it saved the day for me. Great work and thanks a lot!
This is BRILLIANT. Thank you SO much. This video has helped me immensely and saved me (probably) hours of hunting and pecking through features and the "online manual" trying to do something that should only take minutes. I had no idea the multicam stuff even existed.
Dude YOU ROCK! Thank you so much, I'm an intern at USA TODAY and believe it or not I'm pioneering through FCPX for all the FULLTIMERS...you may have gotten me a job :)
We've been creating our own music videos for the last few years, but I have never taken the time to learn more effective and efficient methods. We're using our quarantine to uplevel our skills in that area. Your video will definitely help with that. Thanks for sharing your process! :)
Awesome video and tutorial. I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this yet about how to move the angle to the exact timecode you want, but after the playhead is moved to an exact position you can press N to enable snapping and that makes it a lot easier to drag the clip and guarantee your first frame of that angle snaps to the exact timecode that your playhead is at. Just remember to disable snapping by pressing N again.
Nothing too fancy. We used a Canon 28-70 f2/8 and a Canon 10-22. I think we used the super flat picture style. Lighting really is the key. For this video we used a lot of back light which creates a "rim light." Basically it gives you a glow around the performer's hair. If you like the look you can get it pretty easy by using a really powerful back light. It's definitely an art that you can spend your whole life learning! Thanks again for the nice words!
Awesome! The bit about aligning angles if they don't sync up was VERY helpful. I filmed along to my song (with a 4 count click in the beginning) but was soloing on my acoustic guitar which overpowered the the original reference track in spots. This will make it so much easier now that I've learned how to do it. Thanks!
When trying to sync video from several cameras, I do a trick that makes it very easy to sync the footage. Once all the camera's are rolling, slap your hands together once and very loud. Then when your syncing the video you only have to match the clap peak on the audio. Most of the time FCPX will pick this out and sync automatically for you.
sophtware Yes this is a great technique if you're using multiple cameras for a live event. Once all the cameras are rolling, point them at the director or whoever and do the hand clap (or slate if you have one). My tutorial shows a single-cam shoot so it's not quite the same, but for multi-cam shoots - absolutely!
Thank you so much for this. I'm a newbie coming from iMovie and I am gonna work on my first video song for RUclips and this just made my life so much easier. You explained everything soooo good thank you.
OMG! Ystr it took 3 house of editing video clip...i did not know about multicam. Man with all the respect - thank you=) Since the english is not my mother language, it is very easy to understand you. Good luck!
Good question. It was a traditional single-camera shoot. The band had to play the song multiple times and then we move the camera. But in some shots not everybody was needed. For example when filming the drummer close-ups the rest of the band gets a break because you can't see them in the shot. I try to plan my shots so that we can move quickly without a lot of downtime. To me a big part of all my projects is planning the shots so we don't waste any time and stay on schedule.
Thanks a lot, I was just looking for the Proxy Media option. When editing a music video containing more music clips, Proxy Media is the only real solution that makes sense. Thanks.
i think like, one a year since 2012 i watch this video, cause like once a year a shoot this kind of music videos)) 100000 times thanks dude) everytime refreshes my mind
Hey if you ctrl+click on the track and select "Expand Audio/Video" then they will show up as two separate tracks so you can manipulate the video and audio parts of the clip separately. ctrl+s is the keyboard shortcut that will toggle the expanded/collapsed view.
Awesome tutorial brotha, I was deciding whether I should edit with fcpx or fcp7. I was more comfortable with fcp7 but I knew fcpx had some useful workflows, just didn't know how to use them. Now I do! Thanks to you man! Keep up the great work.
I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2.3Ghz i7, 8Gb w/ SSD. You'd think I wouldn't have any issues but still my fan kicks into high gear whenever FCPX is rendering, even simple projects, let alone a pretty big multi-cam. But it's crazy that this stuff is even possible on a laptop - not that long ago it would have taken a super computer to do it!
optimized media and proxy are different things. proxy are low-res files used only during editing. your computer can play a lot of tracks and/or a lot of plugins using these low-res "placeholder" files. optimized media is high-res and actually replaces your original footage. it's used by FCPX as your "raw" material. When you render your final video you use your original or optimized video to create a high-res final video.
you can ctrl+click and expand audio/video to move them separately, or break the audio/video apart. Once you do that if you want to keep the audio from moving you can create a gap and then "anchor" the audio to that so it's not attached to the video clip
that's a good question, I've wondered that myself because sometimes 1 frame is not accurate enough to get "exact" sync with audio. I think the only way to do this would be to edit the audio with an audio editor and adjust it a few samples. luckily with video - especially music videos a 1/2 or 1/4 of a frame is not noticeable. As you mentioned you can hear phasing if you play it head-to-head with the source which means it is very, very close - not enough for our eyes to notice a sync issue.
You can use the trim tool (hit t on your keyboard) and that will let you slide the edit point forward/backward to adjust where the cut occurs. if you want to actually remove a frame, you can also do that using the blade too (hit b on your keyboard). Once you make a cut like that though your multi-camera clip is now in two parts, which may or not be an issue depending on what you're doing. just zoom way in to get frame-level accuracy.
Long videos can be tricky especially if you don't have the video and audio exactly synced with frame rates considered. The audio can drift a little bit. Logic has some built-in filters for fixing drift. If the cameras started and stopped, that can be another challenge. With FCPX you can go into the multi-cam clip and separate the audio/video. Then make cuts as necessary in either the video or on the audio track in-between songs to push things a few frames and keep everything in sync.
If you don't have a clapper board or a click/clap of the sticks/hand, I use markers on each clip in multi clip view to sync clips, works a treat. For example, listen to the audio of each clip, place a marker on the start of a verse (pressing M on that clip) then once all have markers, they can be snapped together. I did a multi cam view of a band performance and this worked fantastically.
Thanks! I actually only barely looked at Premiere but I know a lot of people who used FCP7 decided to switch to Premiere instead of upgrading to FCPX. I think they're both great programs. Premiere does work really well with After Effects so if you use other Adobe products, that is a plus.
I've tried various syncing plugins and they are absolutely fantastic on live multi-cam footage. This music video (like most music videos) is a single-cam shoot, though. The on-camera audio is subtly different for each take and so the syncing plugins don't work very well. A previous commenter suggested feeding the playback audio into the camera instead of using the mic. That gives you consistent audio on all takes. The only downside is that the camera is tethered to your playback device.
Jason, your video is great. You were very clear and helpful...you move through important points without a rushed feeling, but fast enough to keep interest. I was looking for information because I have never done any video work and I was considering Final Cut Pro. You have me feeling like this is a great step. Thanks very much. Do you train professionally? If not, you should consider it! Great job.
I heard a great idea from somebody about plugging in the output from your audio playback into your camera audio input on set. That way instead of just capturing ambient room audio though the camera mic you are recording the line-in studio recording instead. FCPX can easily auto-sync the footage that way. But still it's good to know how to manually sync footage for those situations where the auto-sync doesn't work!
Not sure if you were amused or being sarcastic, but at any rate it's only the long route for moving clips to a specific point on the timeline. It's not the long route for the whole multi-cam thing. I'm all ears for any tips or links about how to more quickly trim and move clips by entering timecode rather than having to drop/drag them and rely on snapping.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean by the question. But with the kind of traditional performance video I used in this tutorial we have the band playing the whole song from beginning to end from multiple angles. So each verse has plenty of footage and I just the verses, choruses, etc all the same way. It's a bit like a puzzle to get the best shots at the best moments and cut them at the pace that you want.
The short answer is that you do color grading at the very end - that way you are only correcting the footage that is being used, and not wasting time or processing power on grading unused parts of your footage. Sometimes you might do an initial grade when importing footage to get it normalized, in the correct colorspace or another technical reason. Usually those would be very conservative adjustments, though, so you don't do anything extreme that can't be adjusted in your final grade.
awesome - glad you dig it! I have DaVinci installed but haven't actually taken it for a full spin yet. I definitely want to give that a try when I get some spare time.
if you don't like the "magnetic timeline" there's any easy workaround. Only the main "storyline" track will be magnetic. So you can create a gap (edit->insert generated->gap) and put that as main storyline track. Then you leave it along and do all of your work on the tracks above it. They will all attach themselves to the main gap and they won't snap.
@IronmanMensMinistry it's actually not an app, it's just a quicktime movie file with timecode as the video and the song as the audio. I plug the iPad into PA speakers on the set and the band essentially lip-syncs to the audio. By capturing a few frames of the timecode on camera it gives you an exact point to sync up the clip in the timeline when you edit. For a music video you would use the pre-recorded studio tracks, not live audio. You don't even really need to record audio at all.
When you're ready to render you can go back into preferences and select "original media" again, then do your render. If you turn off the angle editor usually you can play your file using the original quality. but if you try to have the angle editor window open and you have too many tracks, it might not play.
thank you jason this was super helpful. it was perfectly paced and really helped me to get a quick jump start into it. i am coming from several years of using sony vegas on windows and it seems that final cut pro has all the same features for music video editing and more.
The band is Ignescent from Chicago. At the end of the video there's one of those pop-up bubbles that links to their RUclips channel. Thanks for asking!
Thank you for this incredibly helpful video! I'm ashamed to say I've been very laboriously and painstakingly editing music videos without using the multi-cam feature for the last 2 years. D'oh!
The built-in syncing of FCPX is basically the same but I think Plural Eyes has more options to dial things in. They both really depends on how similar your "good" audio is with your on-camera audio. For music videos like this one, where you sync up pre-recorded music with footage of a live playback - none of them work very well.
Cool! Thanks for the response! Yeah........that glow effect is really sweet! I have been researching the Canon 7D and some of the attachments that a person can get. Seeing this video really makes the Canon 7D stand out above all the rest! Keep up the killer work! Thanks for listing the lenses and the settings that you used! I am going to try that out!
FCPX was new to me at the time I made that comment but I use it for almost everything now. The people who don't like FCPX are mostly editors who making a living using FCP 7 - because Apple made radical conceptual changes with version X. If you've never worked with another editor software then you would have no pre-conceived notions and so you would just learn the "FCPX way" and have no problems. If you want a more traditional editor at a reasonable price, though, Adobe Premiere also good.
I do CC at the very end because there's no point in color grading footage that will never be used. For this video I did basic color correction to get the shots to match in the timeline. Then I created a composite clip from that and applied a "look" correction to the whole thing. It felt a bit sloppy though and I wasn't really happy with the process. I used to use Color with FCP 7 days but I haven't quite figured out a great system yet for FCPX. I'm a mediocre colorist at best though!
Sure, as long as you can sync the footage you can put them all in a multi-cam clip. The angles don't have to run the whole length of the song. Basically the multi-cam just allows you to visually see multiple angles playing simultaneously and edit quickly. If you don't have any simultaneous footage (ie you only have one angle to choose from at any given point in the song) then the multi-cam is probably not the right tool for the job.
Installing FCPX does not remove iMovie. I've used iMovie myself productively, but I can tell you that FCPX's workflow makes more sense, and if you get stuck you can just look on RUclips for great tutorials like this one.
that happens when you haven't actually generated the proxy media yet. basically you're telling FCPX to use proxy media, but it doesn't exist for that project yet. so it shows the red/yellow warning icon indicating the footage is missing. I show you how to do that at #1:55 in the video
Thank you Jason, I got that. I'm doing no new cuts, as everything is ready, just want to set a new audio globally. Still FCPX is jumping back at the old audio with each cut that's already there (those have also been made with video editing only as you mentioned). Anyhow, I meanwhile figured out that replacing the old audio in the track viewer solved my problem, because FCPX will read from that initially selected track, regardless what is on there ore not. Feels like an odd workaround though...
This video is actually a single-camera shoot. We just recorded over and over again from various angles. That's a pretty typical way to shoot a video. If it were a live performance, though, then we would have used multiple cameras to get different angles. You can edit the same way in FCPX though for both situations.
Hi Jason, thanks a lot for this tutorial! Just a quick question - in the final video, i'm just wondering if the silhouette shots of the singer with the windows behind was "B-Roll" footage or part of the multicam (which would mean you recorded it for the length of the track correct?) Thanks, - ASB
Hey ASB, yea the silhouette was part of the "performance" so it was synced with the multi-cam footage. I think I shot 2-3 takes. One nice thing about using a timecode slate, though, is that you can start and stop in the middle of the song if you know a certain shot will only be used for one specific part of a song and still be able to easily sync during editing. So you don't need to roll the entire song if you know, for example, you're going to use a specific shot during the bridge of the song. For all performance footage though, unless I know 100% for a fact that I only want that shot for one specific part - I tend to just roll the entire song anyway. Because it's just like 3 minutes to run the song, compared with all of the time it takes to setup a shot. It seems like a waste to me to spend hours setting up lighting and dolly tracks or whatever and then only shoot 4 seconds of footage. So I usually roll the whole song and that gives me another possible choice in editing.
I suspect if you had your audio and video timecode-synced on the set you could get better accuracy. Otherwise you're recording at 24p (or whatever frame-rate) so you're only getting 1/24th of a second of accuracy. It isn't noticeable in the audio/video sync but you can hear it with the audio side-by-side. I'm sure an A/V engineer could set us both straight, but that's what makes sense to me.
Awesome video, thank you sir! It looks as though you know your way around FCP X very well, have you compared it to Adobe Premiere at all? Do you like one better than the other (if you're using both that is)?
You can just stack the camera tracks on top of one another and adjust the opacity on the topmost one. You can even use multi-cam clips as you would any other clip so you can stack one on top of another.
You would think that FCPX would use original media for rendering. But as an experiment I had a project with the original media on an external drive and proxy on the internal drive. When I tried to export the project with the external drive unplugged - I was expecting FCPX to tell me that the original media was missing or I needed to connect my drive. However it just exported anyway - obviously using proxy. So FCPX must use proxy media to export if you have your playback settings on 'Proxy'.
Well to be more specific: 1. edit the video 2. color grade all the individual clips in the main storyline to match basic color & exposure (requires a lot of saving/loading presets because FCPX doesn't have copy/paste color grade). 3. select the whole timeline and create a composite clip. 4. apply a "look" grade to the composite clip. 5. make a few cuts to the composite clips and tweak the grade for certain sections of the video 6. switch preferences back to original media and render
It's a macbook pro 2.3 i7 with 8Gb of Ram and an SSD drive. But, I'm not sure if the SSD drive makes a huge difference for video editing. It has very fast seek speed, but I don't think it has as dramatic a difference for constant read speed that video needs. That's just my experience anyway - I thought video editing would be way smoother with SSD but I actually didn't notice a major difference from my regular drive. I also edit off of an external USB drive sometimes and that works.
Thanks! It was shot on a Canon 7D, but it's all about lighting. I had a good DP and grip who were really talented with lighting. I thought they did a great job.
You can add a transition to multi-cam cuts the same way you add one to any other type of clip - just open the transitions pane and drag/drop the transition onto the point in the clip where the cut is
awesome! great tutorial kind of confusing the first time watching but after the 2nd time watching i pretty much understanding the flow of using multicam in fcpx. which ipad app did you use for slate and what was it plugged into i notice something plugged into the ipad? good to know i will be shooting a music video next week. one more ? lol. for every angle you shot did you shoot for the entire song?
I really enjoyed this video a lot thank you. I was absolutely amazed at your ability to run 31 different video takes in multicam. Can you please, elaborate on what sort of hard drive the proxy media was on? I am trying to work out which way to go, in terms of storage space. I read in the comments you mention a mac book pro, i assume its running of internal SSD or similar? Can you please list your specs for me. thanks again great work.
I am having a problem and I can't figure it out. I am used 4 cameras to film a band. And after I click the multi cam sync, one clip does not line up with the other three, in fact it lines up after another clip. I've tried it 5 times and every time it aligns up the same way. What am I doing wrong? And how do I fix this? Thanks
Well generally you leave your footage untouched until it's all edited that way you have the most latitude. Also you may simply waste time correcting a lot of footage that never gets used. That being said, it's common to have a preliminary grade done as footage is being imported. This would usually be a very conservative grade just to get rid of problems or normalize everything because you don't want to lose information or degrade your footage at that stage and be unable to get it back later.
I'm not sure what specs FCPX required but I think it runs decently on any computer they're currently selling. I'm running a macbook pro from last year.
audio editors are definitely a matter of taste & depends on your music style too. I think GarageBand is pretty cool and really cheap (might even be pre-installed on your mac). Then if you outgrow GarageBand you can move up to something like Logic Pro or Abelton Live. I personally use GarageBand for something quick. For projects that I have to trade files with a post production house I use Pro Tools because it's kinda industry standard. I'm getting more into Logic lately though.
I notice that sometimes depending on what you have selected in the app. Like if you have a clip in your timeline highlighted then the sharing options will be grayed out. Then if you click the event name they'll be available. Not sure if that's what's happening but something I've run into.
On FCE I used to go through a song and tap ` in time with the beat to make markers for easy snapping points when i went to cut to camera angles. Now i do the same but 'live' - tapping 1-5 on the beat to cut straight to camera 1, 2 3 4, 5. This has made my job SO much easier. Now - lets get Chapter markers back eh?
Jason, this video tutorial is the best I've seen so far - thank you! I'm on a project at the moment and the multicam clip in the 'all clips' window seems to have a red line at the top. I can't get the blade tool to come up in the angle editor -any ideas?
Really enjoyed the tutorial - thanks! One Q: I'm editing a music video that requires transitions between cam switches. When I add transitions, the transitions affect BOTH vid and audio! How do I "lock" the audio and make sure it never moves in time or gets affected in any way?
Most likely the proxy media is not finished rendering yet. It does it in the background but it can take a long, long time. You will see the red lines disappear one at a time as each clip gets it's proxy media file rendered.
i read some people say you don't have to switch back that FCPX will use the full-res version when you render, but I found that not to be true because I don't see any activity from my external drive (where all of my original files are located) unless I switch back in preferences to original media
Is "rapid beat" a name for a certain style, or do you just mean to do fast cuts to the music? I haven't heard that term before. If you're just trying to cut to the beat of the music, basically you just have to make all of the cuts, then go back and align them manually with the beat. I don't think FCPX has any ability to automatically cut to the beat. It's not that difficult to do manually, but it does take some work if you're doing a lot of cuts.
Thank you very very much! It is very helpful! I have one very important point to add up! Put your sound track or music all together with the videos, then select all, before you create “Multicam Clip”. Than it will have pretty good audio synchronization :) Make be you can put a note on the video.
lol after i synched up all my video and audio in the angle editor i moved my multi-cam sequence to the timeline like you did. But the majority of the multi-cam sequence is black (no audio no video) besides from the first 30 seconds which contains only one of the clips i edited in the angle editor. what happened to all those clips i synched up in the angle editor. when i open the angle editor on the multi-cam sequence all the clips are still there.
right^ the damage is already done though, I'm not sure if there is a way to change that globally but as a work around you could just select all the clips. uncheck audio in your clip viewer and then attach a new audio track to your primary storyline
24fps is the most flexible if you plan to shoot for TV broadcast. But if it is web-only, then you can shoot at whatever looks the best to you. 24, 30 and 60 all have their own look.
The T2i footage would look about the same as the 7D (which is what I used in the tutorial video). You can definitely make a great video with that camera.
Just wanted to send some appreciation your way. I've now edited 3 music videos for my band and I use this video as my bible each time. Thanks for making such a user friendly video. It's great!
Jason, I was pulling my hair out trying to sort out Final Cut Pro x -- then I found your extremely informative, extremely 'to the point' video and it saved the day for me. Great work and thanks a lot!
This is BRILLIANT. Thank you SO much. This video has helped me immensely and saved me (probably) hours of hunting and pecking through features and the "online manual" trying to do something that should only take minutes. I had no idea the multicam stuff even existed.
Dude YOU ROCK! Thank you so much, I'm an intern at USA TODAY and believe it or not I'm pioneering through FCPX for all the FULLTIMERS...you may have gotten me a job :)
We've been creating our own music videos for the last few years, but I have never taken the time to learn more effective and efficient methods. We're using our quarantine to uplevel our skills in that area. Your video will definitely help with that. Thanks for sharing your process! :)
Awesome video and tutorial. I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this yet about how to move the angle to the exact timecode you want, but after the playhead is moved to an exact position you can press N to enable snapping and that makes it a lot easier to drag the clip and guarantee your first frame of that angle snaps to the exact timecode that your playhead is at. Just remember to disable snapping by pressing N again.
Perfect explanation of multiclip with multiple audio sources
best tutorial ever! the multicam thing just wouldn't come to my mind. not in a million years... thx for the video!!!
Nothing too fancy. We used a Canon 28-70 f2/8 and a Canon 10-22. I think we used the super flat picture style. Lighting really is the key. For this video we used a lot of back light which creates a "rim light." Basically it gives you a glow around the performer's hair. If you like the look you can get it pretty easy by using a really powerful back light. It's definitely an art that you can spend your whole life learning! Thanks again for the nice words!
Awesome! The bit about aligning angles if they don't sync up was VERY helpful. I filmed along to my song (with a 4 count click in the beginning) but was soloing on my acoustic guitar which overpowered the the original reference track in spots. This will make it so much easier now that I've learned how to do it. Thanks!
When trying to sync video from several cameras, I do a trick that makes it very easy to sync the footage. Once all the camera's are rolling, slap your hands together once and very loud. Then when your syncing the video you only have to match the clap peak on the audio. Most of the time FCPX will pick this out and sync automatically for you.
sophtware Yes this is a great technique if you're using multiple cameras for a live event. Once all the cameras are rolling, point them at the director or whoever and do the hand clap (or slate if you have one). My tutorial shows a single-cam shoot so it's not quite the same, but for multi-cam shoots - absolutely!
Thank you so much for this. I'm a newbie coming from iMovie and I am gonna work on my first video song for RUclips and this just made my life so much easier. You explained everything soooo good thank you.
OMG! Ystr it took 3 house of editing video clip...i did not know about multicam. Man with all the respect - thank you=) Since the english is not my mother language, it is very easy to understand you. Good luck!
Good question. It was a traditional single-camera shoot. The band had to play the song multiple times and then we move the camera. But in some shots not everybody was needed. For example when filming the drummer close-ups the rest of the band gets a break because you can't see them in the shot. I try to plan my shots so that we can move quickly without a lot of downtime. To me a big part of all my projects is planning the shots so we don't waste any time and stay on schedule.
good video and informative. its great that your actually reading all the comments and trying to help people with their questions.
8 years later, I still come back to this video for help.
Thanks a lot, I was just looking for the Proxy Media option. When editing a music video containing more music clips, Proxy Media is the only real solution that makes sense.
Thanks.
Great tutorial indeed man!
came right before we shot our video clip to a new song...
good job mate!
i think like, one a year since 2012 i watch this video, cause like once a year a shoot this kind of music videos)) 100000 times thanks dude) everytime refreshes my mind
Hey if you ctrl+click on the track and select "Expand Audio/Video" then they will show up as two separate tracks so you can manipulate the video and audio parts of the clip separately. ctrl+s is the keyboard shortcut that will toggle the expanded/collapsed view.
Awesome tutorial brotha, I was deciding whether I should edit with fcpx or fcp7. I was more comfortable with fcp7 but I knew fcpx had some useful workflows, just didn't know how to use them. Now I do! Thanks to you man! Keep up the great work.
I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2.3Ghz i7, 8Gb w/ SSD. You'd think I wouldn't have any issues but still my fan kicks into high gear whenever FCPX is rendering, even simple projects, let alone a pretty big multi-cam.
But it's crazy that this stuff is even possible on a laptop - not that long ago it would have taken a super computer to do it!
optimized media and proxy are different things. proxy are low-res files used only during editing. your computer can play a lot of tracks and/or a lot of plugins using these low-res "placeholder" files.
optimized media is high-res and actually replaces your original footage. it's used by FCPX as your "raw" material. When you render your final video you use your original or optimized video to create a high-res final video.
Thanks for posting this! I learned a lot about final cut. Since i'm a newbie to video editing this was extremely helpful.
you can ctrl+click and expand audio/video to move them separately, or break the audio/video apart. Once you do that if you want to keep the audio from moving you can create a gap and then "anchor" the audio to that so it's not attached to the video clip
that's a good question, I've wondered that myself because sometimes 1 frame is not accurate enough to get "exact" sync with audio. I think the only way to do this would be to edit the audio with an audio editor and adjust it a few samples.
luckily with video - especially music videos a 1/2 or 1/4 of a frame is not noticeable. As you mentioned you can hear phasing if you play it head-to-head with the source which means it is very, very close - not enough for our eyes to notice a sync issue.
You can use the trim tool (hit t on your keyboard) and that will let you slide the edit point forward/backward to adjust where the cut occurs.
if you want to actually remove a frame, you can also do that using the blade too (hit b on your keyboard). Once you make a cut like that though your multi-camera clip is now in two parts, which may or not be an issue depending on what you're doing.
just zoom way in to get frame-level accuracy.
Long videos can be tricky especially if you don't have the video and audio exactly synced with frame rates considered. The audio can drift a little bit. Logic has some built-in filters for fixing drift. If the cameras started and stopped, that can be another challenge.
With FCPX you can go into the multi-cam clip and separate the audio/video. Then make cuts as necessary in either the video or on the audio track in-between songs to push things a few frames and keep everything in sync.
best multi-cam tutorial so far! YOU ARE THE MAN!
If you don't have a clapper board or a click/clap of the sticks/hand, I use markers on each clip in multi clip view to sync clips, works a treat. For example, listen to the audio of each clip, place a marker on the start of a verse (pressing M on that clip) then once all have markers, they can be snapped together. I did a multi cam view of a band performance and this worked fantastically.
Thanks! I actually only barely looked at Premiere but I know a lot of people who used FCP7 decided to switch to Premiere instead of upgrading to FCPX. I think they're both great programs. Premiere does work really well with After Effects so if you use other Adobe products, that is a plus.
I've tried various syncing plugins and they are absolutely fantastic on live multi-cam footage.
This music video (like most music videos) is a single-cam shoot, though. The on-camera audio is subtly different for each take and so the syncing plugins don't work very well. A previous commenter suggested feeding the playback audio into the camera instead of using the mic. That gives you consistent audio on all takes. The only downside is that the camera is tethered to your playback device.
Jason, your video is great. You were very clear and helpful...you move through important points without a rushed feeling, but fast enough to keep interest. I was looking for information because I have never done any video work and I was considering Final Cut Pro. You have me feeling like this is a great step. Thanks very much. Do you train professionally? If not, you should consider it! Great job.
I heard a great idea from somebody about plugging in the output from your audio playback into your camera audio input on set. That way instead of just capturing ambient room audio though the camera mic you are recording the line-in studio recording instead. FCPX can easily auto-sync the footage that way.
But still it's good to know how to manually sync footage for those situations where the auto-sync doesn't work!
Nice tutorial man…I got exactly what I needed in record time...
Not sure if you were amused or being sarcastic, but at any rate it's only the long route for moving clips to a specific point on the timeline. It's not the long route for the whole multi-cam thing. I'm all ears for any tips or links about how to more quickly trim and move clips by entering timecode rather than having to drop/drag them and rely on snapping.
Thank you for this. Very simply explained and saved me a lot of time and hassle. cheers.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean by the question. But with the kind of traditional performance video I used in this tutorial we have the band playing the whole song from beginning to end from multiple angles. So each verse has plenty of footage and I just the verses, choruses, etc all the same way. It's a bit like a puzzle to get the best shots at the best moments and cut them at the pace that you want.
Awesome video, keep it up, you've helped me a bunch, in fact without this video I'd still be sat here scratching my head :-)
The short answer is that you do color grading at the very end - that way you are only correcting the footage that is being used, and not wasting time or processing power on grading unused parts of your footage.
Sometimes you might do an initial grade when importing footage to get it normalized, in the correct colorspace or another technical reason. Usually those would be very conservative adjustments, though, so you don't do anything extreme that can't be adjusted in your final grade.
awesome - glad you dig it! I have DaVinci installed but haven't actually taken it for a full spin yet. I definitely want to give that a try when I get some spare time.
Thanks Jason! The trial version of FCPX is now installed...!
if you don't like the "magnetic timeline" there's any easy workaround. Only the main "storyline" track will be magnetic. So you can create a gap (edit->insert generated->gap) and put that as main storyline track. Then you leave it along and do all of your work on the tracks above it. They will all attach themselves to the main gap and they won't snap.
@IronmanMensMinistry it's actually not an app, it's just a quicktime movie file with timecode as the video and the song as the audio. I plug the iPad into PA speakers on the set and the band essentially lip-syncs to the audio. By capturing a few frames of the timecode on camera it gives you an exact point to sync up the clip in the timeline when you edit. For a music video you would use the pre-recorded studio tracks, not live audio. You don't even really need to record audio at all.
When you're ready to render you can go back into preferences and select "original media" again, then do your render. If you turn off the angle editor usually you can play your file using the original quality. but if you try to have the angle editor window open and you have too many tracks, it might not play.
Thank you so much! Just startin' to use Final Cut and it helped a lot
thank you jason this was super helpful. it was perfectly paced and really helped me to get a quick jump start into it. i am coming from several years of using sony vegas on windows and it seems that final cut pro has all the same features for music video editing and more.
The band is Ignescent from Chicago. At the end of the video there's one of those pop-up bubbles that links to their RUclips channel. Thanks for asking!
i am a big fan of yours now...kudos... thanks for sharing you knowledge to your viewers
Thank you for this incredibly helpful video! I'm ashamed to say I've been very laboriously and painstakingly editing music videos without using the multi-cam feature for the last 2 years. D'oh!
The built-in syncing of FCPX is basically the same but I think Plural Eyes has more options to dial things in. They both really depends on how similar your "good" audio is with your on-camera audio. For music videos like this one, where you sync up pre-recorded music with footage of a live playback - none of them work very well.
Cool! Thanks for the response! Yeah........that glow effect is really sweet! I have been researching the Canon 7D and some of the attachments that a person can get. Seeing this video really makes the Canon 7D stand out above all the rest! Keep up the killer work! Thanks for listing the lenses and the settings that you used! I am going to try that out!
Awesome buddy! best multicam vid for final cut so far
this was very helpful, can't wait to try this multi cam workflow. thanks a lot!
FCPX was new to me at the time I made that comment but I use it for almost everything now. The people who don't like FCPX are mostly editors who making a living using FCP 7 - because Apple made radical conceptual changes with version X. If you've never worked with another editor software then you would have no pre-conceived notions and so you would just learn the "FCPX way" and have no problems. If you want a more traditional editor at a reasonable price, though, Adobe Premiere also good.
I do CC at the very end because there's no point in color grading footage that will never be used. For this video I did basic color correction to get the shots to match in the timeline. Then I created a composite clip from that and applied a "look" correction to the whole thing. It felt a bit sloppy though and I wasn't really happy with the process. I used to use Color with FCP 7 days but I haven't quite figured out a great system yet for FCPX. I'm a mediocre colorist at best though!
The band is Ignescent from Chicago. The full video is linked in one of the link bubbles at the end of the tutorial
Sure, as long as you can sync the footage you can put them all in a multi-cam clip. The angles don't have to run the whole length of the song.
Basically the multi-cam just allows you to visually see multiple angles playing simultaneously and edit quickly. If you don't have any simultaneous footage (ie you only have one angle to choose from at any given point in the song) then the multi-cam is probably not the right tool for the job.
Installing FCPX does not remove iMovie.
I've used iMovie myself productively, but I can tell you that FCPX's workflow makes more sense, and if you get stuck you can just look on RUclips for great tutorials like this one.
that happens when you haven't actually generated the proxy media yet. basically you're telling FCPX to use proxy media, but it doesn't exist for that project yet. so it shows the red/yellow warning icon indicating the footage is missing.
I show you how to do that at #1:55 in the video
Hehe, I started on linear tape editing bays (no such thing as undo or copy/paste). So you can imagine how I feel about all this amazing technology!
Thank you Jason, I got that. I'm doing no new cuts, as everything is ready, just want to set a new audio globally. Still FCPX is jumping back at the old audio with each cut that's already there (those have also been made with video editing only as you mentioned).
Anyhow, I meanwhile figured out that replacing the old audio in the track viewer solved my problem, because FCPX will read from that initially selected track, regardless what is on there ore not. Feels like an odd workaround though...
Thank you so much for this tutorial! Just perfect
This video is actually a single-camera shoot. We just recorded over and over again from various angles. That's a pretty typical way to shoot a video.
If it were a live performance, though, then we would have used multiple cameras to get different angles. You can edit the same way in FCPX though for both situations.
Hi Jason, thanks a lot for this tutorial! Just a quick question - in the final video, i'm just wondering if the silhouette shots of the singer with the windows behind was "B-Roll" footage or part of the multicam (which would mean you recorded it for the length of the track correct?) Thanks, - ASB
Hey ASB, yea the silhouette was part of the "performance" so it was synced with the multi-cam footage. I think I shot 2-3 takes.
One nice thing about using a timecode slate, though, is that you can start and stop in the middle of the song if you know a certain shot will only be used for one specific part of a song and still be able to easily sync during editing. So you don't need to roll the entire song if you know, for example, you're going to use a specific shot during the bridge of the song.
For all performance footage though, unless I know 100% for a fact that I only want that shot for one specific part - I tend to just roll the entire song anyway. Because it's just like 3 minutes to run the song, compared with all of the time it takes to setup a shot. It seems like a waste to me to spend hours setting up lighting and dolly tracks or whatever and then only shoot 4 seconds of footage. So I usually roll the whole song and that gives me another possible choice in editing.
WOW! It came out awesome! A++! Did you use any fancy lenses on the camera or custome settings? I would love to get quality like that!
bomb help! made my final cut pro dreams come true. Thnx Mch.
I suspect if you had your audio and video timecode-synced on the set you could get better accuracy. Otherwise you're recording at 24p (or whatever frame-rate) so you're only getting 1/24th of a second of accuracy. It isn't noticeable in the audio/video sync but you can hear it with the audio side-by-side. I'm sure an A/V engineer could set us both straight, but that's what makes sense to me.
Awesome video, thank you sir! It looks as though you know your way around FCP X very well, have you compared it to Adobe Premiere at all? Do you like one better than the other (if you're using both that is)?
You can just stack the camera tracks on top of one another and adjust the opacity on the topmost one. You can even use multi-cam clips as you would any other clip so you can stack one on top of another.
you just motivate me in to getting this program because i was wonder if i could make music videos on it.
You would think that FCPX would use original media for rendering. But as an experiment I had a project with the original media on an external drive and proxy on the internal drive. When I tried to export the project with the external drive unplugged - I was expecting FCPX to tell me that the original media was missing or I needed to connect my drive. However it just exported anyway - obviously using proxy. So FCPX must use proxy media to export if you have your playback settings on 'Proxy'.
Well to be more specific: 1. edit the video 2. color grade all the individual clips in the main storyline to match basic color & exposure (requires a lot of saving/loading presets because FCPX doesn't have copy/paste color grade). 3. select the whole timeline and create a composite clip. 4. apply a "look" grade to the composite clip. 5. make a few cuts to the composite clips and tweak the grade for certain sections of the video 6. switch preferences back to original media and render
It's a macbook pro 2.3 i7 with 8Gb of Ram and an SSD drive. But, I'm not sure if the SSD drive makes a huge difference for video editing. It has very fast seek speed, but I don't think it has as dramatic a difference for constant read speed that video needs. That's just my experience anyway - I thought video editing would be way smoother with SSD but I actually didn't notice a major difference from my regular drive. I also edit off of an external USB drive sometimes and that works.
Thanks! It was shot on a Canon 7D, but it's all about lighting. I had a good DP and grip who were really talented with lighting. I thought they did a great job.
Indeed 7 years later its really good. What type of len (s) did you used on the Canon 7D?
Thanks so much for your explanations!!! Made my day and many days from now on...
You can add a transition to multi-cam cuts the same way you add one to any other type of clip - just open the transitions pane and drag/drop the transition onto the point in the clip where the cut is
awesome! great tutorial kind of confusing the first time watching but after the 2nd time watching i pretty much understanding the flow of using multicam in fcpx. which ipad app did you use for slate and what was it plugged into i notice something plugged into the ipad? good to know i will be shooting a music video next week. one more ? lol. for every angle you shot did you shoot for the entire song?
I really enjoyed this video a lot thank you. I was absolutely amazed at your ability to run 31 different video takes in multicam. Can you please, elaborate on what sort of hard drive the proxy media was on? I am trying to work out which way to go, in terms of storage space. I read in the comments you mention a mac book pro, i assume its running of internal SSD or similar? Can you please list your specs for me.
thanks again great work.
AMAZING explanation! What software do you use to capture your screen?
I am having a problem and I can't figure it out. I am used 4 cameras to film a band. And after I click the multi cam sync, one clip does not line up with the other three, in fact it lines up after another clip. I've tried it 5 times and every time it aligns up the same way. What am I doing wrong? And how do I fix this? Thanks
Well generally you leave your footage untouched until it's all edited that way you have the most latitude. Also you may simply waste time correcting a lot of footage that never gets used.
That being said, it's common to have a preliminary grade done as footage is being imported. This would usually be a very conservative grade just to get rid of problems or normalize everything because you don't want to lose information or degrade your footage at that stage and be unable to get it back later.
I'm not sure what specs FCPX required but I think it runs decently on any computer they're currently selling. I'm running a macbook pro from last year.
audio editors are definitely a matter of taste & depends on your music style too. I think GarageBand is pretty cool and really cheap (might even be pre-installed on your mac). Then if you outgrow GarageBand you can move up to something like Logic Pro or Abelton Live. I personally use GarageBand for something quick. For projects that I have to trade files with a post production house I use Pro Tools because it's kinda industry standard. I'm getting more into Logic lately though.
if you're in the multi-cam editor you can use the , and the . key to nudge left or right a frame.
When I export to DVD it's not that good quality please help, I am using 1920by 1080 video
I notice that sometimes depending on what you have selected in the app. Like if you have a clip in your timeline highlighted then the sharing options will be grayed out. Then if you click the event name they'll be available. Not sure if that's what's happening but something I've run into.
On FCE I used to go through a song and tap ` in time with the beat to make markers for easy snapping points when i went to cut to camera angles.
Now i do the same but 'live' - tapping 1-5 on the beat to cut straight to camera 1, 2 3 4, 5.
This has made my job SO much easier.
Now - lets get Chapter markers back eh?
Jason, this video tutorial is the best I've seen so far - thank you!
I'm on a project at the moment and the multicam clip in the 'all clips' window seems to have a red line at the top. I can't get the blade tool to come up in the angle editor
-any ideas?
Really enjoyed the tutorial - thanks! One Q: I'm editing a music video that requires transitions between cam switches. When I add transitions, the transitions affect BOTH vid and audio! How do I "lock" the audio and make sure it never moves in time or gets affected in any way?
oh, also if you don't see the multicam feature, you may need to go to the app store and check for upgrades. that feature was added with version 10.0.3
Most likely the proxy media is not finished rendering yet. It does it in the background but it can take a long, long time. You will see the red lines disappear one at a time as each clip gets it's proxy media file rendered.
i read some people say you don't have to switch back that FCPX will use the full-res version when you render, but I found that not to be true because I don't see any activity from my external drive (where all of my original files are located) unless I switch back in preferences to original media
Is "rapid beat" a name for a certain style, or do you just mean to do fast cuts to the music? I haven't heard that term before.
If you're just trying to cut to the beat of the music, basically you just have to make all of the cuts, then go back and align them manually with the beat. I don't think FCPX has any ability to automatically cut to the beat. It's not that difficult to do manually, but it does take some work if you're doing a lot of cuts.
Thank you very very much! It is very helpful! I have one very important point to add up! Put your sound track or music all together with the videos, then select all, before you create “Multicam Clip”. Than it will have pretty good audio synchronization :) Make be you can put a note on the video.
lol after i synched up all my video and audio in the angle editor i moved my multi-cam sequence to the timeline like you did. But the majority of the multi-cam sequence is black (no audio no video) besides from the first 30 seconds which contains only one of the clips i edited in the angle editor.
what happened to all those clips i synched up in the angle editor. when i open the angle editor on the multi-cam sequence all the clips are still there.
right^ the damage is already done though, I'm not sure if there is a way to change that globally but as a work around you could just select all the clips. uncheck audio in your clip viewer and then attach a new audio track to your primary storyline
Nice. Which procesor do You use to play so many videos at once? is it possible to do it on Quad core 2.2Ghz?
24fps is the most flexible if you plan to shoot for TV broadcast. But if it is web-only, then you can shoot at whatever looks the best to you. 24, 30 and 60 all have their own look.
The T2i footage would look about the same as the 7D (which is what I used in the tutorial video). You can definitely make a great video with that camera.