Video
Multi-camera Mix
Introduction
One of the first edited projects I was asked to make was a video of an amateur stage show, but I wanted to avoid the rather boring consequence of just pointing one camera at the stage and leaving it running. When you watch a professional broadcast of a stage performance, the picture is continually switched or faded from camera to camera, which makes the whole thing much more interesting on a small screen. In broadcast work this is usually done live, but I decided that with a digital editor I would be able to do the same thing off-line after the event. I wasn't certain when I started whether the whole idea would work at all; but it did, and I was pleasantly surprised at the results I was able achieve. So were the cast of the show!
This was all done entirely on amateur equipment, without the aid of timecoded recordings, etc. The final video was around an hour and a half's duration, and in producing it I refined the editing techniques considerably. In this article I cover the lessons I learned, and provide some tips on how to set up the cameras and sound recording for best results.
This article is mainly for readers who are familiar with using digital editing software (e.g. MediaStudio or Premiere), and with the basic techniques of capturing, editing, and creating video files. If you are new to the subject, it will give you some idea of the sort of results that are possible.
This article was first published nearly three years ago in Computer Video magazine, and the screen shots on later pages are from MediaStudio Pro 5. Other specific details relate to MediaStudio, but have been updated to reflect version 6 as well as other current technology such as DV.
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