Live Video Mixing in FCP?

April 21, 2006 10:04 AM

Help me edit video in real-time, from two recorded feeds of the same event!

I need to edit a movie of an event that was already recorded previously. There were two cameras (mini-dv), and I can synchronize them -- that's not a problem, but I'm wondering if there's any way in Final Cut Pro (or any OSX software) to edit them in realtime -- that is, to have the two feeds play simultaneously, and appropriately choose either feed for a certain moment in time, while the feed is playing.

If you've ever worked with a simple live video mixer, you know what I'm talking about...

posted by provolot to Technology (4 answers total)

What version of FCP are you editing on? FCP5 has a feature that does exactly what you ask -- you capture all n streams of video as you would normally, then set up a "multi-camera timeline," mark a synch point across all the different angles, then play back the sequence and use keyboard shortcuts or buttons on the toolbar to switch between the different angles in realtime. You then commit the edits to the timeline, at which point you can keep working with it as you would any FCP project.

As far as I know, you can't do this with realtime playback from DV decks, you have to capture the tapes to disk as per usual FCP operations.
posted by Alterscape at 10:10 AM on April 21, 2006

Yeah, if you are using FCP 5 the feature you are looking for is under the Modify menu, it's called Make Multiclip. You will need to synchronize your different clips first, but once you have that the Multiclip viewer it becomes pretty obvious how to do it.
posted by quin at 10:28 AM on April 21, 2006

RT multicam FCP5


Multicam FCP4
posted by filmgeek at 12:51 PM on April 21, 2006

Response by poster: Yeah, I have 4.5, unfortunately. Thanks a lot, everybody, and filmgeek for the Multicam plugin!

I think I might end up just marking each moment with the backtick key, then going back and hand-editing, I guess.
posted by provolot at 6:51 PM on April 21, 2006