Multi camera Video shooting
Shoot with more cameras
I was listening to a podcast, the Mac Power Users Podcast and they had a guy on there, Wally Cherwinski who was talking about using multiple cameras for a video shoot. I do have a number of cameras that I could put to a task like this and so I was quite interested. I have my own NEX 6 Sony mirrorless camera and my wife has one which is exactly the same. Then I still have the Canon Vixia video camcorder which I used to use for my videoing and which still works very nicely. Then there is the Canon 600D which I have been planning to sell but haven’t got round to it yet. I also can shoot video with my iPhone, but the trouble with that is that the storage space is extremely limited. Then there is the iPad and once again I would have similar problems with the amount of space available for the recorded video. Another possibility is to shoot video with my Samsung Galaxy S3, but to be honest I have found that this device not as good as I would like to be for recording video. The problem that I have with it is that sometimes the audio is out of sync with the video and that causes me some problems. Those problems would be even worse when trying to integrate that video along with a video from other cameras. Haven’t really used the Nexus 7 for shooting video, but I will have to give that a try and see how that works out. So as you can see it is not outside the bounds of possibility that I could do some multi-camera video shooting. I had already used the synchronisation features of Final Cut Pro X to synchronise audio and video. This is where I have recorded audio separately from the video camera and then matched the two together so that I would have the best audio to use with the best video recordings. This would be the first time that I would use multiple cameras and the syncing of them in order to get the effect like you see when watching a television programme and they are switching from one camera to another live.
Putting together a multi-camera video
The problem that you have to deal with is that each of the cameras are shooting from a different position and will have to deal with the available light in the venue. There can also be differences in terms of how the hardware reacts to the light. Fortunately there are ways of adjusting the video for colour casts and lighting in Final Cut Pro X. The other thing that you have to think about is the audio. Audio is vitally important within any video and you have to deal with getting the audio right on as many of the video recordings as possible. One reason for this is because you can let Final Cut Pro use the audio as part of the synchronisation process as it is the one thing that is going to be the same on each of the video recordings. What you then have to remember is that there are going to be differences in the level of the audio depending on where the camera is placed. I had one camera that was near to the speakers and so we picked up the audio very clearly and then there was another camera which was set to the back of the room and the audio recording was not nearly as good. Fortunately when I did the synchronisation of the video clips from the various cameras, the audio from the back of the room was good enough for that part of the job.
