Multicam with field recorder workflow

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Trevor Asquerthian

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Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostFri Mar 14, 2025 4:55 pm

Anyone successfully using multichannel (more than stereo) external recorder audio *INSIDE* a multi-cam clip?

Just trying to figure out how I would do workflow that is pretty standard in Avid and PP - multi-cam video with field recorder audio embedded in the multi-cam source clip. (Searched youtube but found nothing useful.)

(NB I have read other posts that suggest editing separate audio in the master timeline, not synced in the multi-cam clip, but that is useless to me for reasons of quickly keeping check on sync, match framing etc).

1. Multicam clip (5 cams, no audio) is edited into Master timeline.

So it seems that every multicam 'angle' (video track) in Resolve has a single audio 'angle' (audio track).

First thing I tried was adding the (6 channel wav) audio as an extra angle - and modifying the track type to be adaptive.

This gets me the first 2 tracks of the wav in the Master timeline - but not tracks 3-6 (although I can hear them if I open the multicam clip in the timeline).

I presume this is because the Multi-cam sequence output is stereo... So I modify the multi-cam sequence bus format to be 5.1 - as there is still no adaptive bus formats that I can see. But that didn't help - partly as this assignment doesn't stick when multi-cam is 'opened in timeline' again - it reverts to stereo.

I tried various other options around having each external track be a separate angle - again I could hear them in the multi-cam clip but could only get source tracks 1 & 2 to play out once the multi-cam clip is edited into the master timeline.

Thanks
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Steve Alexander

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostFri Mar 14, 2025 5:54 pm

I have a 5 channel wav file. The first thing I do is the sync this to each of my video clips so that the media properties of each video clip now shows 5 mono channels of linked audio. Then I select the video clips and turn them into a Multicam clip. The Multicam clip has 5 channel adaptive audio at this point. Then I select the Multicam clip and create a timeline from it using the clip's audio properties and I end up with a timeline with 5 mono layers of audio and a single video layer.

Add - Note that I tried to reproduce this with a sync map timeline turned into a Multicam clip and then inserted into a new timeline and couldn't get the mapping right - I will probably play with a bit more to see if I can manually set this up.
aka Barkinmadd
Resolve Studio 20 | Fusion Studio 20 | 16" MacBook Pro M1 MAX, 32 GPU cores, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, Sequoia 15.4.1
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Trevor Asquerthian

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostFri Mar 14, 2025 7:39 pm

Thanks Steve, that's a big help.

Turns out there's some special sauce when you create a multicam timeline with the external audio that you don't seem to be able to replicate afterwards - the track type for the external audio is '8 mono' rather than adaptive and, even though the output bus for the multicam clip itself is stereo - when you add the multicam to a regular sequence it knows to spread the 8x monos across 8 mono timeline tracks.

So I *think* I have this working now, without the need to sync the audio / video ahead of time (which is painful because the choice is timecode or waveform - not marks - and the cut page 'sync clips' option (which does sync by marks) does not then allow you to create a multicam (as the sync clip is a multicam already).
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Steve Alexander

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSat Mar 15, 2025 2:24 am

That's exactly what I saw (5 mono in my test). I can't replicate this with a manual approach to building a Multicam clip. Would love to know what is happening under the hood here - very odd.
aka Barkinmadd
Resolve Studio 20 | Fusion Studio 20 | 16" MacBook Pro M1 MAX, 32 GPU cores, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, Sequoia 15.4.1
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Trevor Asquerthian

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSat Mar 15, 2025 8:07 am

It's similar with separate mono files - the track type is 'mono' rather than '1.0', although 1.0 *seems* to work the same.

Requires the master timeline to have duplicates of the multicam, switched to the audio angles.

For the particular PP workflow I'm trying to emulate I get separate wavs per contributor, so I think this *should* work.
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Steve Alexander

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSat Mar 15, 2025 12:28 pm

This tutorial by Chris Roberts is useful:

aka Barkinmadd
Resolve Studio 20 | Fusion Studio 20 | 16" MacBook Pro M1 MAX, 32 GPU cores, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, Sequoia 15.4.1
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Trevor Asquerthian

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSat Mar 15, 2025 3:12 pm

Thanks Steve,

but he advocates using the flatten multi-cam workflow for audio that I have seen elsewhere.

The new 'use source audio channels' in v19 seems to be the way to go - allows multichannel wav files to be edited individually. (zip file has more detail in form of html doc).


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Steve Alexander

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSat Mar 15, 2025 3:26 pm

Agreed, but Chris' workflow is very solid and as you and I both discovered, the new 'use source audio channels' workflow can't be replicated when building a Multicam from a timeline (or at least we don't yet know how to replicate it). From a practical perspective, typically one would use a separate set of audio channels from a field recorder and wouldn't bother worrying about the audio within the Multicam clip, particularly if you capture your media with a jam-sync'd timecode.

I would like to understand how to replicate the 'use source audio channels' option when building a Multicam timeline from scratch (using the timeline converted to Multicam clip functionality).
aka Barkinmadd
Resolve Studio 20 | Fusion Studio 20 | 16" MacBook Pro M1 MAX, 32 GPU cores, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, Sequoia 15.4.1
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Trevor Asquerthian

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSat Mar 15, 2025 5:24 pm

I'm thinking I'd build one matching my requirements then duplicate and copy and paste timelines into it.

I still edit mainly in PP (and Avid, to a lesser extent) because that's what most of my clients want but keep an eye on Resolve. (I use it for grading).
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Trevor Asquerthian

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostSun Mar 16, 2025 5:42 pm

Here's an example of how I might use it, having created a sync map in a regular timeline (apologies for MOS - but should be clear enough).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FLz1rO ... EdK_51-Fks

1. Create sync map
2. Right click on poly-wav to 'create multicam clip' and 'use source audio channels' - named 'MC template'
3. Copy all video clips and first audio track in sync map
4. Open 'MC template' in timeline and replace with pasted clips
5. Select 'MC template' and 'create timeline from clip'
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Steve Alexander

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostMon Mar 17, 2025 12:18 am

That's very cool that it works and that it retains the secret sauce :-)
aka Barkinmadd
Resolve Studio 20 | Fusion Studio 20 | 16" MacBook Pro M1 MAX, 32 GPU cores, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, Sequoia 15.4.1
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Trevor Asquerthian

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Re: Multicam with field recorder workflow

PostMon Mar 17, 2025 6:31 pm

Trevor Asquerthian wrote:Here's an example of how I might use it, having created a sync map in a regular timeline (apologies for MOS - but should be clear enough).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FLz1rO ... EdK_51-Fks

1. Create sync map
2. Right click on poly-wav to 'create multicam clip' and 'use source audio channels' - named 'MC template'
3. Copy all video clips and first audio track in sync map
4. Open 'MC template' in timeline and replace with pasted clips
5. Select 'MC template' and 'create timeline from clip'


Here's a version where I modified the 8x mono to be 8x adaptive to see what happened

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FMRxy8 ... sp=sharing

Behaves as expected, really - other than there is unexpected increase (BUG?) in gain on ch3 and ch4 of the embedded 8x adaptive clip when in the multicam. Reverts to correct level when flattened.

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