Kicking the tires on the Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3 Multicam update

Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

The ease of setup and managing multicam clips makes this the best FCPX update yet

As we all know by now Apple released their promised update to Final Cut Pro X that added multicam. It’s only been a week and there’s already a lot of articles and tutorials about how this new feature works. I sat down with it some over the weekend to kick the tires and see how it performed. What follows are some thoughts, notes and observations as I was working with it. I was especially curious as to how it might work for music videos.

Don’t believe everything you read about the new FCPX multicam. It is good, well thought out and it presents a whole new set of tools when dealing with multicam setup that makes it the leader of the pack. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say Apple reinvented multicam editing with this release I would say they rethought it. The truth is there’s really only so many ways to effectively edit multicamera products. Once you’ve gone through what can be a tedious setup process then it’s basically switch the cameras to the angle you want. It makes the most sense to use some kind of split where you can see more than one angle at a time and that’s what FCPX does, what FCP7 does and what Media Composer does. I’m not exactly sure how Adobe Premiere Pro does it but I do know it only works with 4 angles while FCPX can work with 64. This guy knows how PPro does it.

I’m not going to go into great detail on exactly how to use FCPX multicam. There’s already been articles and tutorials written on just that (one here on PVC) so as I mentioned above these are my notes.

As far as basics of mutlicam editing goes Apple has done a good job of rethinking how a multicam edit is setup, synced and managed throughout the edit. This is managed in two stages. Syncing angles and managing the multicam clip once it’s setup. read more...