Chapter Five. Multi-Camera Production in Premiere Pro

It's great to go into post-production knowing you've captured all the footage you need in a well-orchestrated multi-camera shoot. But it can be a logistical nightmare to sort, trim, synch, color-correct, and integrate it all if your editor of choice doesn't have a tool designed to streamline the process.

Shooting Multi-Cam Events

Whether you do weddings or stage events or produce corporate training videos, shooting with multiple cameras is either a wonderful luxury or a competitive necessity. At weddings, strategically positioning two cameras on tripods while a third camera operator roams handheld getting nifty angles, has become standard operating procedure. When shooting concerts and other stage events, capturing multiple angles is essential to replicating the way such events are presented on TV and in films. As with all event production, there are no second takes.

There are two basic elements of this type of production: the Multi-Camera shoot and the editing thereof. Regarding the shoot and the artistic elements of the Multi-Camera edit, I've developed a set of rules that I follow (and share with my co-shooters on events) that you can find on this Web site: http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=11640.

Fortunately, with version 2.0, Premiere Pro has added just such a tool. This chapter covers the technical aspects of Premiere Pro's Multi-Camera editor, which, frankly, I adore. Clips are wonderfully easy to synch, Multi-Camera color correction is very efficient, operation is fast, and you have an almost unlimited ability to edit your footage after you've selected your camera angles.

At a high level, here's the workflow. You collect and synchronize your clips on one sequence, which I always name something like "pianosynch." I'll refer to this first clip as the synch sequence throughout this chapter.

Then you drag this synch sequence into another sequence, which I always call something like "piano-edit," where you actually make your camera selections and fine-tune your edits. As you've probably guessed, I'll call this second sequence the edit sequence in this chapter.

This chapter follows that workflow, and concludes with a look at how to pan and zoom within your HDV clips in a Multi-Camera edit.