1 File With 3 Cam Angles - Very Choppy Experience

[boybonji]

I am trying to edit a long form video, my set up consists of 3 camera angles.

I record through OBS. I set up my three cameras through a camlink, set up the three shots and hit record on my computer. This saves me the trouble of messing with SD cards and batteries and gives me one nice preview screen with all my angles on my monitor.

The output of this is one file in mp4. This file is 5760x1080 and includes my three camera angles at 1920x1080.

I then enter Premiere, duplicate the video source into three tracks, and change each respective position so that I now have three separate videos of my three angles. 

I consider my computer to have pretty decent specs, but this does not run smoothly on my PC. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it takes a while for the video to pause or play.

I tried using multicam for easier editing, and this is not better. Same story, works for a bit then becomes really slow. I rolled back my Premiere to 23.1 because of multicam issues apparently (it would crash every time) but this didn't help. 

I tried using proxies. This made it even worse for some reason. I cannot even get it to play smoothly even once on a proxy at Cineform Low Resolution.

Maybe the fact that every "shot" is not really just a 1920x1080 video but is actually a 5760x1080 repositioned could be doing me some damage? 

I would just like to know what I'm doing wrong and how to be able to edit normally without crazy lag and pauses and stutters.

My Specs:

Windows 10 pro

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz

32 GB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey boybonji,

I read your note with interest, as your non-traditional editing and multi-cam workflow is a cool idea. I hope I can help you dial it in. 

My first take is that your system might not be able to handle such media (oversized frames, VFR H.264 from streaming video coming from OBS, etc.) along with the scaling and positioning of the frame. These things might be killing performance. Proxies created by Media Encoder might even not be optimal, so relief from your performance issues might not be available even with them. 

If I were in your position, I think that optimizing the source media might be a good first step. Cropping and encoding the single large frame into 3 separate ones. into an editing codec at HD frame size is what I would want to do. You can look at the freeware app, Shutter Encoder to optimize the media to, say, ProRes LT. After doing so, then you might try cutting it. Your multicam edit would probably go smoother too. l

You may want to try a test with a minute of the footage to see if you can edit easier. Sometimes some upfront work in optimizing your footage can you save you time on the back end. Try it and let us know if your edit session goes more smoothly. Hope so.

Thanks,
Kevin