4K Multicam Magic

Welcome to Final Cut Pro X in under 5 minutes. I’m Steve from rippletraining.com. In this episode, I am going to show you how to create additional angles for your multicam projects even when you didn’t actually shoot additional angles. I’ll say up front this is one of the best tricks when you don’t have the budget for more than one camera or you don’t have time to shoot more than one take. In the timeline I have open a 5 angle multicam project of a bay area band called Bad Jones. It was shot with a RED camera, DLSR’s and a few GoPro cameras. I’ll play the first 13 seconds of the video to give you a feel for the rough cut in progress… If you look in the Angle Viewer, I had 5 video angles to cut to – one for each of the band members. However, because of time restraints, I wasn’t able to get the extreme close up of the singer I wanted. Before I delve into how to create an extreme closeup where one doesn’t exist, I should point out that the Singer was shot with a 4K camera. This is important because I hear over and over how shooting 4K is overkill – broadcasters and home entertainment systems don’t support it yet – yada, yada. Well I’m going to show you why you SHOULD shoot 4K – especially for multicam shoots. If you look at this timeline, it’s set up for 1080p delivery. Which means that if I need to, I can scale any 4K stream in the multicam clip up significantly while still maintaining high-quality 1080 resolution. I’ll start by double-clicking on a clip in the timeline to open the angle editor. Here we see the 5 band member angles laid out horizontally. Each angle is clearly labeled. As I mentioned, I would like to add an extreme close up of the singer. I’ll click on the triangle next to the angle name and choose > add angle. I’ll name the angle “Singer XCU”. Next, I’ll option-drag the Singer angle into the empty angle container in order to duplicate it. In order to view the changes I’m about to make, you’ll need to click the angle monitoring button. Doing this will make the angle you’re working on active in the Viewer. With the angle selected, press Shift-T to reveal the Transform controls. You’ll need to zoom out a bit so you have room to scale the video. Drag any corner handle. I’m going to scale this angle to 160%. When you’re finished scaling and re-framing, turn off the transform controls and press Shift-z to fit the image to the viewer. I’ll then return to the main timeline by clicking the history button. Now the fun part. I can now pick up my multicam edit where I left off, but this time I have a closer angle of the singer to cut to. Allow me to demonstrate… Playing the edit back, I now seamlessly cut to an angle that didn’t exist saving me time and money. Are you now convinced you should be shooting in 4K? If you liked this tutorial and want to learn more tricks on how to edit mutlicam projects, check our our Multicam Editing in Final Cut Pro X tutorial available for sale on our web site. If you use the code below, you can get 25% off before the end of the month.