Help with Multicam

[Jim Andrada]

I've just spent a couple of days editing and cutting a 5 camera recording of a 1h45m classical concert

And just tonight I found out I need to make a 15 second cut in audio and video near the middle of the project.

I can cut out the section on both the audio and video tracks, and move the rest of the audio track to the left, but I can't figure out how to select all the video to the end of track and move it with the audio. I tried moving the individual clips but quite a few of them have cross fades so that wasn't too successful.

Any thoughts? I guess I could always render the first part and the second part separately and then put them together and re-render, but that sounds pretty silly (and time consuming!)

Thanks

[Leslie Wand]

ripple edit across all tracks?

[Jeremiah Rickert]

There are a couple of ways I would do this. If there wasn't a time crunch, I would render the entire thing out (so you just have a single audio and single video track) and then I would remove the offending 15 seconds and just drag the gap shut. (or put a cross dissolve or whatever you need). Then you re-render the entire thing. If you have one of the last couple versions of Vegas it will just skip through the parts that didn't change and not re-render them (so there's no loss from being re-rendered) and in the preview window it says "no recompression necessary" or something like that.

The other way (and if you have a lot of separate pieces this can be tricky). You switch to the "Selection edit tool" at the top there. It's icon looks like just a mouse pointer, it's between the connect-the-dots looking icon and the hourglass. Then you just click and drag a huge square over everything that you want to move. Once you have selected all the pieces you want to move, find a chunk (I usually use something on the timeline that isn't near a cut so I don't just drag the cut) and click and hold and you can slide the whole thing over.

The only problem with ripple delete is that it only ripples in that track. You could use if you use the slicer to put in your cut. Then before you remove it, use the selection edit tool described above to grab everything to the right of the cut and use the "g" button (I think) to add it to a group. I think then if you have ripple delete selected above and you remove the cut, everything you've grouped will slide left the same amount.

I do these multicam things all the time, and the one time I needed to cut a chunk out in the middle, I just rendered, snipped, and re-rendered because I didn't want to screw up 5 cameras and 32 tracks of synced audio. Hehe.

[Dave Blackhurst]

What Jeremiah said... I've used the select and group and drag method myself.

And do a save BEFORE you try it, "just in case"... sometimes selecting a lot of bits on a big timeline can be a tad tricky!

[Peter Riding]

The simple way I usually do this is to click on one of the relevant events immediately to the right of the cut. Then Ctrl + Click on the event nearest to the cut for all the other tracks. Once you have in effect selected the first event on each track, right click and select "Select Events To End". Then just drag the whole lot to the left.

Crude but effective.

Pete

[Jeff Harper]

Jim, I've done this hundreds of times on lengthy projects.

What Leslie says. Cut out the offending section, then Change AutoRipple to affect all tracks, etc and drag the section from right to left to the point where you want it.

It's a piece of cake and can be done in less than 60 seconds.

[Jim Andrada]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions

I think I'll do the cuts on the rendered file - seems to be the safest way.

Feels like somewhat of a disadvantage to the way Vegas does this whole multicam thing though.

By the way - is there any way to replace a take with a different one? I decided in one spot that it would be better to use a different camera. Right clicking the take in the timeline that I want to replace brings up a menu and I picked TAKES and clicked the one I wanted to use but nothing happened.

[Peter Riding]

Jim, my method is very easy and is done with safety in mind. I don't want Vegas autoing anything. But do save frequently in incremental numbers so you can go back.

All my projects are multicam. I do this dragging thing all the time, usually whilst still in Multicam Edit mode but sometimes afterwards.

When you come out of that edit mode you have a choice of retaining or losing the takes you did not use. I seldom keep them (they are not actually deleted of course) as they clutter up the tracks and make things harder to see. If you did keep them you should be able to change anything. If not, you could go into a version of the project before you came out of Multicam and grab the take from there for insertion into your later version.

Pete

[Jim Andrada]

Thanks Peter

I guess I'm missing something else here - how do you get Vegas to show you all the takes as tracks again? I though I did it once but couldn't remember how.

[Garrett Low]

Leslie's method is the right way to do it. Generally there isn't a right and wrong way but if you render and then cut it and re-render that is a band aid. The problem will be if you end up having to change something later, say for instance you find a mistake in one of your lower thirds, or you discover another change you want to make like changing where you want to cut to a different camera.

I've done hundreds of multicam edits with Vegas and have cut, moved, replaced portions without any issues using ripple-edit. Make sure you do have the correct ripple-edit mode set and you will be fine.

[Jim Andrada]

Hi Garrett

Sounds right, but how the devil do you get it to show you all the tracks after being in Multicam mode???? If I could just get it to do that I think I'd be home free:<))

[Edward Troxel]

Jim, have you even tried what everyone is recommending (as they're all recommending the same thing)?

I do usually do it slightly differently. I would put the cursor in the blank spot and then use the Select Events tool in Excalibur to "Select all events after the cursor" and then just drag them left.

However, you've lost nothing in trying this method. If you don't like how it worked, fine - just don't save it or do an undo.

Breaking the project back out into individual tracks will just make the project much more complicated and will cause more confusion and issues than leaving them as takes.

[Jim Andrada]

Sorry if a little frustration was showing through. I've been staring at this video for three or four days now and I'm getting a bit tired.

I finally think I've got it Took a while to get smart enough for all the suggestions to suddenly make sense.

Thanks to all.

[Jim Andrada]

Welllll...

Might have spoken too soon.

I did as suggested and using Auto Ripple everything looked good. The audio track closed up just fine, as did the Video track

But a few transitions later, one of the tracks (only) started going out of sync with the audio. I tried a few more times and the result was the same - loss of sync. WHY it would cause a take to lose sync is a huge mystery, but it did.

Anyhow, I went back to the render and fix method.

I'll do more experimentation after I get this video delivered.

[Jeremiah Rickert]

Originally Posted by Jim Andrada

Hi Garrett

Sounds right, but how the devil do you get it to show you all the tracks after being in Multicam mode???? If I could just get it to do that I think I'd be home free:<))

I think once you build the multi-cam track, you can't "explode" it again.