Collapsing a Multiclip

Once you've completed editing your multiclip, refined your edit points, and settled on your camera angles, you may need to output your sequence and pass it along to someone else, such as a colorist or audio mixer. Instead of passing along the sequence with a multiclip in it, you can collapse the multiclip so that only the active angles are accessible. In this way, no one can make any unwanted changes to your sequence. You can uncollapse a sequence at any time, returning it to the original multiclip state.

NOTE

Once you've finished your edit, collapsing a multiclip will make playback less taxing on the processor and free up speed for other editing functions or effects.

1.	In the Timeline, press Cmd-A to select all the clips.
2.	Ctrl-click any portion of the multiclip and choose Collapse from the shortcut menu. You can also choose Modify > Collapse Multiclips. When you collapse a multiclip, only the actual clip name not the angle number or multiclip name appears on the clips.
3.	Try to switch to a different angle for any one of the clips. The other clip angles are not available to you in this mode.
4.	To uncollapse or bring the multiclip state back, select all the clips, and choose Modify > Uncollapse Multiclips, or Ctrl-click a selected clip and choose Uncollapse Multiclip from the shortcut menu. The angle numbers and multiclip name appear once again on the clips in the Timeline. You can collapse or uncollapse one or several clips in the multiclip at one time.
5.	Switch to a different camera angle for any clip in the sequence. With the multiclip state restored, you once again have access to the different angles at the playhead location.

NOTE

If you are going to do a lot of multicam editing, there are a few other topics you may want to read about in the Final Cut Pro user's manual, such as optimizing system performance and using the Make Multiclip Sequence option.

TIP

To revert back to your normal editing setup and continue working with the remaining lessons, change the Easy Setup preset back to DV-NTSC. Then, from the Tools menu, reload the default layouts for the keyboard and button bar, or reload your customized layouts.