Get me started with Multicam in Premiere

[JRHowell]

I have a Multicam project to do … however, here’s the rub.

I have the following assets.
1) Audio off the board
2) Audio on microphones in the audience
3) Video (with audio) from a back camera
4) Video (with audio) from a side camera
5) video (with audio) from a roaming camera

I’ve done a little work looking at how to do Multicam video in premiere. They all seem to assume that all assets are running continuously.

IN my case, assets 3 and 4 are running continuously, but generate new files every few minutes. Therefore I’m wondering if I should concatenate these before moving forward.
Asset 5 is not continuous, but I’d like to have that considered as single camera that has action as occasional clips …

And … I really want to make assets 4 and 5 some additional camera views by cropping …

Can someone point me in the right direction? Do I need to concatenate all the camera clips first? DO I need to build a continuous camera sequence for asset 5? Is there a convenient way to maake "virtual cameras" with different crops?

Thanks

[R Neil Haugen]

In Premiere, the discontinuous clips will be added at the approprite time but on a new track, so it can result in 'extra' camera angles. You can manually move them down so that say all of Cam3 is on track 3 and the same with Cam4.

But ... if you put them all together and output a single file first, it would be quicker in Premeire.

Neil

[Richard M Knight]

I do a lot of multi camera edits but never use 'multicam'

I put Black on V1, the wide lockoff on V2 and the other cameras on V3, V4 etc.

I then just cut out the sections on the higher cameras that didn't work to reveil the tarcks below.

[MyerPj]

I must have made 50 Multicam sequences before I did my first real one. I started a new project once I figured out how to proceed. There's two steps really, create the multicam source sequence(s) and then create the 'New sequence from clip'. In between those, you can modify the source sequence. Move clips to other tracks, change the scaling of clips (I typically have at least 1 UHD camera, so I change the source sequence to 50% scaling so I see a full screen shot on the multi-cam monitor, and you can use scaling then on the final (if sequence is HD), etc. So, experiment away, and come up with a method from ingest to end. Oh, and I always use Proxies, created before the multicam.

[Michael Grenadier]

if cameras and 3 and 4 were running continuously, they were hopefully creating what are called "spanned" clips which consist of one clip from multiple files.  If you import your files into premiere, Premiere should have both the individual files and the spanned clips which consist of multiple files.  If I remember correctly, the individual files will have 0 duration while the spanned clip will have the total duration...  You should be using the "spanned" clip in the multicamera sequence.   If this is not the case, please tell us what camera these files were created on...  Sometimes it makes sense to just export the spanned clip, so you have a single file with all the sources in it.  In particular, if you're going to export an xml to send the project to resolve for color correction, this is the way you have to go.  

I may not be describing this concisely or accurately.  It's been a long day so hopefully someone else will step up and correct any problems here, or you can post back with any questions and hopefully I can help you thru the issues.  It's not simple.  welcome to my hell..

I'll see if I can find an old multicamera project and see exactly what's going on... even if the media's offline

[Michael Grenadier]

here ya go.  see how clip 8 has a starting timecode and an ending timecode and a duration while 9 and 10 have no starting timecode but a duration that matches the duration of clip 8.  clip 8 is a spanned clip while clip 9 and 10 are part of that clip.  hope that helps make sense of this.  It's not simple, and frankly premiere could handle this better.   bwdik