OK--Another learning experience on my part that I'll journal and hopefully save someone the pain I experienced.

I recently did a series of 2 camera recordings for promotional/instructional videos.  Each of the 3 videos were to be about 20 minutes long, and ultimately distributed together on a DVD.  The speaker had asked that I do what I could to remove stutters, repeats, uhhh, umms, and the hard swallows and coughs that come after 20 minutes of speaking.  No problem said I.

Since they were 2 camera sessions, my intent was to log them as camera 1 (audio) and camera 2 (no audio) and use Liquid's excellent multicam feature to edit it down.  I began using multicam as usual, but found that the number of clean-ups was more that I had expected, and it became clear that it was going to be easier just to use timeline cuts instead of multicam (you would have to see it to fully grasp the challenge).  I abandoned multicam.

So I got it all edited, everything rendered, applied a de-esser on the audio, created titles, reviewed the videos on a TV via BOB and thought I was done.  That's when I found that the sequence would not export in any way--Liquid would consistently return an error that it was "missing media."  These errors were captured in the error log too.  Through experimentation, I found that the errors were related to the fact that the video captured as camera 2 (no audio) was the culprit.  There was nothing that I could do to get it to export--no changes of audio presence in the properties, no setting of mark-in and mark-out to avoid the suspect video, no toggling of the track audio icon--nothing.....well, nothing except logging the tape again to include audio.  With the refreshed video, I had to replace all camera 2 slices.

The lesson learned--once you start down the multicam path, designating which camera has the audio during logging, you must stay the course.  Make your decision early as you are bound to it.  This cost me about 3.5 hours.  My error.

In general, unless you're using multiple cameras where some (or all) of the cameras are video-only (no audio) then you should always capture as Camera 1. This way you have all of the audio. When capturing to DV you don't save any space by not capturing audio as the audio is interleaved with the video, so the space is allocated anyway. And you may find that you've got a bad spot in the primary audio and can dub over audio from a different camera (something I've had to do on a number of occasions).

Cameras 2 and up are really meant to be used for multicam only, and only when you don't intend to ever use audio from those cameras.

Yup Dave.  That's the essence of my message.  Thanks.

I am sure that had I continued to use multicam for selecting the shots, I would have been fine, but the problem arose not during editing, but during export.  I found this odd as playback and render was all fine, but I do understand that it was my error and hope that I can help others avoid similar pain.

Fred, there is no such thing as enough redundancy, especially with one time events.

I've created a quad pip fx that gives me all 4 cams in different quadrants on the timeline. I have all cameras sync'd with either camera flash or audio "snap". I create an empty track above the others, copy and drop into the top empty track the cam I want to use at that moment. A bit time consuming, but all the source material is there in case you want to make a change later.

John 

TVJohn:

Fred, there is no such thing as enough redundancy, especially with one time events.

I've created a quad pip fx that gives me all 4 cams in different quadrants on the timeline. I have all cameras sync'd with either camera flash or audio "snap". I create an empty track above the others, copy and drop into the top empty track the cam I want to use at that moment. A bit time consuming, but all the source material is there in case you want to make a change later.

John 

This is old school multicam editing!!.. and time consuming!

To have all sound tracks, just edit your multicam clip and send it to the timeline. Then synchronize the other sound tracks in your sequence under the multicam edit. I do that when I have a stereo sound from the mixer on one cam and a shotgun mic on a second cam.

 

Hi John,

Hope you don't mind a question from a total newcomer to all this . . .

 I am new to the forum, and I am an utterly inexperienced new Liquid user.  I am involved in a project where I want to take 3 separate video clips (simple webcam clips, AVIs) recorded from 3 angles simultaneously.  I have successfully gotten them marked-in and synched in the source viewer in multicam display (4 quadrants), but what I really want to do is to export them as a single video file that maintains the quad split appearance (i.e. be able to watch all 3 videos playing in cync in their respective quadrants of the screen).  I got a bit of advice from an Avid Media Composer user who didn't know anything about Liquid . . . he used similar terminology to what you said in this post (quad pip fx).

Is this possible with Liquid?  (Am I even explaining myself clearly?)

 Thanks,

Aaron

You don't want to use multicam to do this. That is not what it is for. You want to use one of the 2D editors which each clip on a seperate track and apply the 2D editor to each clip and then size and position each clip as reqired to acheive your quad split. It would be useful to read the manual on how the effects editors work. You would need to turn off keyframes to do this. Liquid is easily capable of making this effect.

To keep it brief, lay each clip on the timeline. turn off the video tracks in all but what you are working on. use the 2d clasic editor to create a pip in say the upper rt quadrant, no keyframes. Turn that track off, turn the next track on use the 2d to create a pip in the Left top quadrant, and so on.

When you are done turn all tracks on. You should see four pictures in the viewer. You can create an empty video track above the existing tracks for the "output" video.  Slice the clips at the desired edit points and drag up the clip you want to the newly created track.

I would suggest you do this with the video only, the audio mixer would be a better place to pan the audio tracks.

I agree with Sylvain. We make our basic multicam files up as Dave has suggested using each as Cam 1.

However, we have six channels of audio from the three cameras - plus, occasionally two wild tracks of music or choir on our H4.

To handle these when we're making up the multicam sync file, we make a total of three using each camera as th"lead" camera in turn by changing the name of the clip temporarily so it comes to the top of the list and thus has iits sound tracks selected.

We use one of the multicam syncd files to do the vision edit, then bring in the four remaining soundtracks and do a final sound mix from the six tracks.  If there's additional music from the H4 we bring that in and sync it before the mix.

It's a feature of Liquid that we value highly simply because it is so efficient.

flip1943:

To handle these when we're making up the multicam sync file, we make a total of three using each camera as th"lead" camera in turn by changing the name of the clip temporarily so it comes to the top of the list and thus has iits sound tracks selected.

You don't need to rename clips. You can turn off auto-ordering in the rack. Each time you click on the track header, it cycles between ascending, none, and descending. When no order is selected you can drag the tracks into the order you want them.

As so often Dave, you/re able to tell me a better way than I discovered myself.  Thanks again.