United Media Multicam
Here's a software add-on for Adobe Premiere that lets you direct a production after the fact -- it's Multicam by United Media ($599), software that can give you a timeline-based editing environment with up to four cameras synched together. Then, as you work your way through the production, you pick which camera is "on line" at any given time. The software works only with Premiere on Matrox products, including RT2000, RT2500 and all the DigiSuite iterations.
Multicam allows you to synchronize two, three or four cameras on a timeline, and the lower-priced Multicam 2 ($299), allows two cameras. To use it, first you need to videotape multiple cameras shooting the same subject at the same time (for this review, we used four sources). Or, you could use four different scenes shot with one camera, where each one was synched to a music track, for example, in a music video production. Using Premiere, you capture each of your cameras' video and place the four clips onto four separate video tracks. No need to synch them up; that will be done in Multicam. You save the Premiere project and name it something you'll remember, placing it in a location on your computer you can get to easily. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
The next step is to open that Premiere project you just saved in the Multicam application. Then you'll see all four clips lined up on a timeline. Now it's time to synch the shots, which is a fairly simple process. It's especially painless if you've jam-synched the cameras on location, that is, placed identical time code on all four, because all you have to do is tell the software to synch the clips by clicking on Synch by Time Code and it's done. If you haven't recorded the shots with identical time code, not to worry. Find a spot in the clips, perhaps where you had someone clap or where your talent started talking, and place a marker on each clip at that point. As soon as you choose Synch by Clip Marker, all the clips are synchronized.
Then the fun starts. As you play the footage, you select which camera is on line by using the number keys 1 through 4 on your keyboard. The video from all four cameras is arranged in your choice of a square, quad-box configuration, or lined up in a row. Hey, this is fun! It feels like directing a live multicamera shoot without all the pressure. It's great to see the video playing back at a full 30 frames per second for all four cameras at the same time, a feat that's especially significant because it can be done with a common EIDE drive. We old timers are amazed whenever see something like this, a feature that just a few years ago would have been a multi-thousand-dollar option on an Avid Media Composer.1 2 Next
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