MacMost Now 698: Better Audio With Final Cut Pro Multicam Editing

Multicam editing can be used to combine multiple angles of the same shot. But it can also be simply used to combine a video show with separate audio. You can record video from one device and audio from another and easily combine the two in Final Cut Pro.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let me show you how to get better audio in your videos using Final Cut Pro's multicam editing.
So my iPad is all the way across the room, and it gets pretty good video. But, the microphone is all the way over there on the iPad, pretty far away from me. However, I've got my iPhone here, and I'm recording my voice using a voice meme recorder app and it's going to create an audio file, and hopefully when this is done I'll be able to use this audio with that video very easily with Final Cut Pro.
So back in episode six sixty nine we looked at multicam editing. One of the neat things you can use multicam editing for is simply combine video with audio. So, in that example I was shooting video with a camera that was too far away for the microphone to work really well, and then I had a microphone very close to me. Now, both were recording audio, so I was able to use multicam editing and its audio sync feature to sync up the two tracks, the audio-only track and the video plus audio track so they synced perfectly. Then I was able to select just the audio track - you saw me switch over there - and I'm going to show you exactly how I did that. So you can do the same thing using very nice professional audio recording equipment that's right near you and a camera that's far away. Or you can use the same thing to record, say, an event like a wedding with a good microphone up front, really close to the action, and then have video that's much further back, and get that audio without having to wire everybody up with mics, or have a really expensive shotgun mic or something like that.
Alright, so here I am in Final Cut, I've got a new project started at the bottom, and I have the two clips here. This is the video clip taken from the iPad and this is the audio-only clip that's taken from my - the iPhone I'm holding in my hand there. Ah, I can create a multi-cam clip by selecting both of these, and then I can ah control click on it, that's one way to do it, and create a new multicam clip. Now, I can check off here "use audio for synchronization" and it should sync up the audio in the video clip with the audio in the audio-only clip. Now I've got this multicam clip here, I'll drag and drop it into the project, and I've got the multicam editor open here, the multiple angle editor open. Um, if you don't have it open, you can go ahead and open it, a let's see it's in the... there it is, a show and hide the angle viewer, you'll find it there in 'window,' right there. So! Now that I've got those two open, I'm ready to work with them. So what I can do now is simply, ah, let's trim the video a bit. You can see there's really nothing much that happens there, nothing much that happens here. Right now the first clip, the video plus audio clip is what's going to play, so I will only hear that if I play it. So my iPad is far away. so the audio is very far away, you probably couldn't hear it there. Ah, I'm going to switch to the multicam switcher here to audio-only. So any switching I do will only switch the audio, it won't switch the video. And I'm going to get to the point in the video where I want to do the switch for my example. pretty far away from me... And I'm going to stop it there, and I'm going to switch over to the recorded voice memo, and you can see it creates a divider there. So now it switches over and for the rest of the video it will remain with that audio source. However, I've got my iPhone here, and I'm... Now of course if I was doing this ah for real, I wouldn't want to switch it over there in the middle of the clip I'd want to actually start off at the very beginning. So I'm basically not really switching very much but just switching that once at the very beginning, and using the 'syncing' between audio and video with the audio to get everything perfectly in sync, and have it all work out. Now, if the audio from the camera wasn't actually good enough to sync it, or maybe I didn't even have any audio from the camera at all, I could actually go down into here and ah I could choose to go into the angle editor down here, and I've got the ability now to sync the audio with the video, I can basically move this along, and if I expand it a great deal, I can actually get it to a point where I can see the wave just enough so I can work with it, move it just bit by bit just to get it perfect. So it even works if you don't have enough audio to sync.
So this opens up a lot of possibilities because now you no longer have to have a microphone wired to the camera to record good audio with your video. You can actually record them completely separately and sync them up together in editing. Hope you found this useful, til next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.
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Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 698: Better Audio With Final Cut Pro Multicam Editing”

Tim

12 years ago

Hi Gary,

I miss being able to leave comments, so I decided to send you a pm to thank you for your videos.

The last two videos were very helpful to me.

I just started working with Final Cut Pro X. I want to record my Native American Flutes with an echo/reverb effect to make them sound like I'm outside in a canyon. Can you tell me how to get this effect? I have a 2011 iMac, New iPad and a Snowball Blue mic. Thanks for any advice.

Take care,

Tim  :)

Gary Rosenzweig

Miss being able to send comments? But you ARE posting a comment. What do you mean?
I would use GarageBand to get your echo. It is easy to apply audio effects like that there.

Zach

Hey Gary,
you could have just used the "synchronize clips" option instead of making a multicam clip, which may have suited the use case better.

Scott

Does Final cut pro have great text capabilities like I would do in keynote as a transparent video overlay in iMovie?

Not sure what you mean. There are lots of title choices, yes. And each choice has lots of options, yes. And with Motion you can even create your own title templates.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 698: Better Audio With Final Cut Pro Multicam Editing

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 698: Better Audio With Final Cut Pro Multicam Editing”

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