Monday, November 17, 2014

Sorting out your footage

By now, all of the teams have recorded a multi-cam interview using the Sony FS100 and the Panasonic GH3, with audio recorded on the Zoom. All teams should have finished copying these files to their hard drives.

Now it is time to sort all of this data out into something usable.

1) The first thing that you need to do is import all of it into Final Cut Pro X. Create a new Library on your portable hard drive to contain all of your files, which will be imported into an "event" in that library.

The files you have will vary:

One long file of the entire interview from the FS100 - the "A" Camera.
A series of shorter files in series from the GH3 - the "B" Camera.
Three files from the Zoom: Tracks 1 and 2, which are the shotgun microphone, and Track "34" which will be the lapel microphone of the interviewer.

2) One thing that is going to make your life easier in the long run will be to go and take all of the GH3 files and turn them into one long interview file like you have for the FS100. To do this:


  • Create a new project within your new library called something like "John Doe GH3 full interview" or similar. 
  • Select all of the GH3 files and click on the "append files to the storyline" button, or simply hit "E" to add them to the storyline. They should be added in the right order because they will be in your list of files that way automatically because of the sequential file naming. 
  • Once all of the files are in the timeline, you are going to make an exported master file of all of the GH3 files into one big clip. To do this, select File -> Share -> Master File (or Command-E)
  • Make sure you use Apple ProRes422. It will probably be the default setting anyhow, but click on the "Settings" tab to make sure. 
  • Save the file to your portable hard drive some place where you can find it.
  • Import this exported file into your library and use it instead of the individual GH3 files. It will make synchronization work A LOT easier. 

2) The second goal will be to export a file that you can use to transcribe your interview. You will want it to have the entire interview and you will want it to include all of your audio tracks, but only one of your camera angles (either the "A" camera or "B" Camera.)

To accomplish this, you need to synchronize the audio from the Zoom with the files from one of the camera angles. You have done this already, and I have detailed it here.

If the synchronization worked properly, you will want to make a new "Project" within your library. Call it "interviewname transcription file" where "interviewname" is the name of your interviewee. Once this new project has been made, drop the synchronized clip onto the timeline. Be sure to adjust the audio by shutting off the audio from whichever camera angle you used and only using the audio from the Zoom.

With everything synchronized and properly on the timeline, you are ready to "share" the file again. This time, however, you will use File -> Share -> Master File and change the settings to "H.264" instead of Apple ProRes422. This creates a much smaller .mov format Quicktime file that can be used efficiently with our InqScribe software.

3) The third thing that you are going to do is to create a MultiCam clip using the FS100 clip, the full GH3 clip, and the two shotgun microphone tracks. The MultiCam clip you generate is going to be what you use to edit into your film, so you aren't going to need or want the lavalier because you probably have figured out by now that the lapel microphone worn by the interviewer adds a lot of unwanted noise to the recording.) There might not be much difference between the two shotgun microphones, but the idea of hooking two of them up is to have them at slightly different recording levels in case the audio spikes or gets too low, allowing you to switch between them as necessary.

We'll talk more about editing with a MultiCam clip later, but for now, let's talk about creating that MultiCam clip:

Select the FS100, GH3, TR1, and TR2 files from your interview.
Go to File -> New -> Multicam Clip.
Make sure audio is being used to synchronize the clips.
Create the MultiCam clip.

If we get this far this week, we're doing good.

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