Serious Multicam - FCP X

Ken Stone's FCP by Bill Davis

Some months ago, I was looking for a project that would let me explore FCP-X’s multi-cam capabilities. Then I heard about “The Nash” – Phoenix’s new Jazz education and performance venue. I figured a project with them might be a great opportunity to learn something useful about the subject, so after securing permission from the venue, I pulled together a volunteer crew for a live performance shoot featuring a five-piece jazz combo drawn from the graduate music students at Arizona State University.

Saturday morning we all converged on the facility - twenty or so volunteers, 14 cameras (7DSLRs and 7GoPros) and five musicians.

I built my initial camera plot around four primary manned DSLRs (the blue ovals on the plot above) positioned in a rough arc aimed at the band. Monitor lines from these to video village would let me direct these to avoid getting stuck with four simultaneous medium shots of the same player at the same time.

To add a more active view, we had one stabilizer-mounted “Rover” DSLR to grab behind the scenes shots and interesting angles. read more...