Tutorial: Multicam Editing in Apple FCP X, Part 1
Our Final Cut Pro X tutorial series continues with the first installment of a 3-part series on multicam editing in FCP X, addressing the basics like creating a multicam clip and cutting and switching audio and video using the Angle Editor.
Preparing the Multicam Clip for Editing
To edit your multicam clip, highlight it and drag it down to the timeline. By default you’re not going see your angles in your Viewer. You have to enable your Angle Viewer, and there are a couple ways to do that. You can hit this triangle all the way on the upper right, and choose Show Video Angles (Figure 7, below), or press Command > Option 7 on your keyboard.
Figure 7. Choosing Show Video Angles
Once that’s open, you can actually see all three of your angles. Figure 8 (below) our Boom Mike angle here, Camera 01 and Camera 02.
Figure 8. Angles shown
Working in the Angle Viewer
There are a lot of changes you can do and tweaks you can do to your Multicamera Clip, and to do so, you actually have to get into the Angle Viewer. There are two ways to do that. You can either right-click on the Multicamera Clip in the project, and choose Open in Angle Editor (Figure 9, below) or simply double-click it in the Event Browser.
Figure 9. Choosing Open in Angle Editor
Once you’re in the Angle Editor, there are a ton of things you can do with your clips there. In this example, I don’t want my Boom Mic to be in the upper left, so I want to reorder that. I can’t click and drag it; it doesn’t do anything. I have to go all the way to the far right of the timeline to a little hash mark area. There your cursor becomes a hand, and you can click and drag that down (Figure 10, below).
Figure 10. Dragging down the Boom Mic clip
When I dragged that clip to the bottom, the Boom Mic audio angle went down to the bottom--it re-ordered. I want to swap the order of the Camera 01 and Camera 02 clips using the same method. These little hash mark areas here are essentially for toggling your angles around without changing the sync--it changes only the way the clips appears in the Angle Viewer.
So all the way to the left of the timelines you’ll see two icons. With the one that looks like a television, you can toggle the View or what angle you want to look at. Or you can hit the icon that looks like a little mic icon to change which angle you’re listening to. You can use the mic icon to toggle the angles’ audio on and off, listen to it, and double-check your sync.
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