Dafydd, I have attached the file dxdiag produced as fgd3dxdiag.txt. It will probably tell you I can't run PD13 on my computer, but I do it anyway. I appreciate all your help in getting me started with my project.
Neil, thanks for the pointer to your tutorial. It was very helpful.
I finally finished my project and am very pleased with the results. I learned a lot about using PD13. I also discoverd one mistake I made shooting the event--I should have kept all three cameras rolling through the entire event. I was able to use audio analysis in the main edit window to synchronize the files from the two continuous cameras but I didn't have much luck with the third camera which had a lot of short clips. I think there just wasn't enough audio information in the short clips for PD13 to find their match in the longer clips. I believe if I had just three clips of the entire event the audio analysis would have been able to synchronize all three.
MultiCam Designer didn't work for me. I think my computer just isn't powerful enough. With multiple video streams I could only preview for about five seconds before the video stopped and all I was previewing was the audio. When I stopped the audio playback by clicking the Pause icon the play head jumped way ahead in the video. MultiCam Designer relies on a solid preview playback for you to select different cameras at the appropriate times.
So what I did was add two tracks before the fx track. I put the two clips from the camera that recorded the entire event onto track 1. There were two files because the camera started a new file when the first grew to 4GB. The second camera failed to create the second file at the 4GB mark so I put its single clip on track 2. I then aligned those two tracks with the audio align feature, using track 1 as the master audio track.
I tried placing all my short clips from the third camera on track 3 and synchronizing all three tracks at once. The short clips weren't placed anywhere close to where they belonged so I cleared track 3 and populated it manually. I would preview the clip in the media library. If I wanted to use it I dragged it to track 3 as close as I could to where I thought it belonged. Then I previewed that segment of the timeline with the audio enabled on tracks 1 and 3. Where timing was critical I slid the clip on track 3 later on the timeline until I could hear a word from track 1 repeated on track 3. Then I slid the clip earlier until it sounded natural. I usually did that with track 2 suppressed entirely. I always suppressed the audio from track 2.
When track 2 was enabled it would obscure track1. To show track 1 I would split the track 2 clip and create an opening by trimming the two clips. I trimmed by dragging the end of the clip and then choosing "Trim only" from the pop-up menu. That sets mark in and mark out without moving the clip on the timeline. Having worked so hard to align tracks 1 and 2 I didn't want to move either of them.
Any place I had a clip on track 3 I trimmed away the track 2 content behind it. That seemed to help with the preview. It meant I had content on at most two tracks at any point on the timeline. Track 1 was continuouis. Sometimes track 1 was visible, meaning there was no content on the other tracks at that point. Sometimes track 2 was visibile, meaning there was no track 3 content at that point. Sometimes track 3 was visible, meaning there was no track 2 content at that point. I could have left the track 2 content intact behind the track 3 clips and it wouldn't have affected the final product, but it did seem to affect the preview.
Another thing that helped with the preview was to drag the play head slowly along the timeline. That forces the frames you want to preview to be loaded into memory so they will be available quicker than if they have to be read from disk for the first time.
When I produced my movie I had all three tracks enabled but the audio from track 2 and track 3 was suppressed. All the audio came from track 1. That way I didn't have to worry about matching varying volume levels. It also prevented any audible artifacts when starting or stopping a clip on track 2 or 3.
I hope my description will be helpful to anyone else trying to edit a multi-camera project with a slow computer. PD13 will synchronize tracks using audio analysis in the main edit window, so you don't have to use the Multi-Cam Designer plugin. I understand that was not the case with earlier versions. My two fixed cameras were mounted on tripods and connected to AC power so I had no worries about running them for the entire event. My hand-held camera was running on battery so I stopped recording and turned it off when it wasn't needed. I think that made the job harder. If I were doing the job again I would keep it running continuously even if it was pointed at the floor. It's easy enough to split and trim the footage later to remove anything unwanted. It's hard to get the audio synchronized. With a long running time different cameras may drift a bit, requiring the audio to be resynchronized later. If you have to move a clip to synchronize it with the audio from another track, split and trip the clip first so you only move the part that is out of synch.
If your computer is up to it, Multi-Cam Designer is great. But if your computer isn't powerful enough to run Multi-Cam Designer you can still produce a good three-camera project.
Fabbian
| Filename |
fgd3DxDiag.txt |
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| Description |
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| Filesize |
72 Kbytes
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| Downloaded: |
334 time(s) |
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