[SOLVED] multicam workflow question

I'm working with a multi-cameral shoot of four+ hour concert, with several short sets, each one by a different artist.

What I'm trying to do is generate rendered, graded, aligned clips from each camera for each set to give to the artists. That is, I want the first artist to get four clips, one from each camera, and one audio clip, for their set. The second artist gets theirs, etc....

I have footage from four cameras and I have audio recorded off the mixer. I can get these aligned properly either as a multi-cam clip, or just as separate tracks in a timeline. And I can edit this so that I have a timeline with separate sections, trimmed for each set.

How do I do this kind of export? Last time I did this, I duplicated the timeline once for each camera angle, deleted the other video tracks, selected each section (via markers with duration), and manually added each range to the render queue in the Deliver page: So, for a four camera shoot with audio for 9 acts, that's 36 manual "select range, add to render queue" sequences, plus another 9 with different settings for the audio. Somewhat tedious!

Is there a better way?

I played around with "Individual clips" - but that doesn't seem to be for this situation: Not only doesn't include audio, but it is linked to the original source clips. In this case, some of the angles are long continuous shoots from GoPros which end up as multiple files. So the single take is actually a compound clip from multiple camera clips.

You'll want to make use of the "individual clips" delivery method to cut down on the manual labor during delivery, but to avoid problems with it you should actually string out your clips on the timeline as regular clips, not multicam clips. You can *use* multicam clips to achieve this end goal, but flatten them before you export them. Keep in mind that any color work you do on top of a multicam clip in the timeline gets discarded when you flatten it, so either do your camera matching *inside* the multicam (right-click on MCC in timeline -> "open in timeline"), or flatten it before you grade it.

What I mean when I say that you can "use" multicams, is that you'll mainly use them for temporal alignment and camera-color-matching, primary adjustments. Once you've done this work "inside" the MCC, back out to your main timeline by double-clicking on its name in the lower left, drop the mcc on your main timeline, trim the ins and outs, duplicate it to the RIGHT for as many angles as you have, then use the dropdown menu to change each duplicate to a different angle. Then, lasso them all, right-click, and flatten. After that, exporting as individual clips should work.

*edit*
So, for a four camera shoot with nine acts, you'll have 36 clips strung out on one timeline horizontally. You'll only have to trim 9 ins and 9 outs. You'll export once and end up with 36 separate files.

Well.. that's pretty close....

I did my alignment and trims in the timeline as a timeline with 4 video tracks. Then, after trimming, I moved each angle down onto track 1, at the end, so I ended up with:

[cam 1 set 1] [cam 1 set 2] [cam 1 set 3] ... [cam 1 set 9] [cam 2 set 1] [cam 2 set 2]...

Now I can deliver with "Individual clips", and it does create one render job that output as I want. With two nits:

1) There is no audio - there *is* an audio track in the rendered files, but it is silent. From my forum poking, I think this is a limitation of "Individual clips"... but wish there were a way to have it. I can render the audio clips separately (and they'll line up), but that seems like a pain for no good reason.

2) The naming isn't great - I tried to use the preserve source dir. options but didn't get that to work. Hints?

Hmmm... to follow on - it might be because my clips start out as a compound clip (the GoPro puts out 12min. files when recording for long periods). The source clips have audio. The compound clip correctly shows a compound audio track and plays it....

I found a working process:

1) You must not have compound clips: They will not retain audio when exported via "Individual Clips" option on the Deliver page. So, for things like GoPros that generate a series of files for long shoots, stream concatenate them with ffmpeg first:

Code: Select all

   chmod -x G*.MP4
   ls -1tr G*.MP4 | sed -e "s/\(.*\)/file '\1'/" > concat.txt
   cat concat.txt # make sure order is right
   ffmpeg -f concat -i concat.txt -c copy angle-concat.mp4


This will create a single video file source, without re-encoding.

2) In Resolve, align your clips on a timeline, one clip per video track. You can align them in a multi-cam clip, but then you need to open up the multi-cam clip in a timeline so that you can see it as multiple tracks, select all, copy, and then paste that back into the timeline so that you now have multiple tracks in the timeline.

3) Trim the content to a series of clips. You can easily do this by setting the in point at the end of one set, the out point one frame before the start of the next, and hitting the delete key. You end up with something like:

Code: Select all

  V4: [set 1]   [set 2]     [set 3]
  V3: [set 1]   [set 2]     [set 3]
  V2: [set 1]   [set 2]     [set 3]
  V1: [set 1]   [set 2]     [set 3]


4) On the Deliver Page, the "Individual Clips" option will now export each clip, on each video track, independently, with the original audio.

Done!

Hey,
I just read the topic and for what you need, I can confirm you're right because I had the answer (sorry, didn't read the topic before - or any other one on the forum - because I was busy elsewhere).
So yes, that's the best way to do.
I'm on mac and regularly use Plural Eyes to perform almost a one-click action to have all tracks synced, sent to Resolve by xml.
By the way, I'm also aware of it because I always concatenate gopro files anyway, that is before any project which includes gopro files (and I do it inside Resolve to (1) concatenate and (2) have prores files in the end).
Good continuation.