2 Camera Editing
In a previous page I talked about some of the consideration when doing a two camera shoot. On this page I’m going to show you how I approach editing the footage from a 2 camera shoot. I use Vegas Studio but the same techniques could be applied to any editor that has multiple track capability.
The first thing I do is to bring the footage from both cameras into the timeline. I the use the audio track to look for events that I can use to synch up the two cameras.
To gain a little more precision I zoom in on the area of interest.
Synching by audio alone get’s you close but it is not perfect. Imagine if you are using two cameras. One in the front of the hall and one in the back 100 feet away. Since sound travels at 1100 ft/s the sound will arrive about 91 ms later at the camera in the back of the hall. It doesn’t sound like much but since a frame of video = 33 ms your video can be off by up too three frame if you bas your synch strictly on the soundtrack.
Enough of the anal geek talk !
Once I have the video tracks aligned pretty close I set the transparency of the top track to 50% so I can view both tracks at once. I then nudge the top track one frame at a time until both tracks are as close as possible. It’s pretty amazing but your brain will notice something it not quite right even if you are a couple frames off.
Video of two video layers with top layer at 50% opacity
One you get the layers aligned it is easy at this point to do crossfades and transitions that are smooth.
As a side note the camera for the wide shot was a borrowed Sony VX1000. I was pretty concerned that the image quality and color balance from my $350 Canon ZR camcorder would look drastically different than the three-chip, broadcast-quality VX1000. I was pleasantly surprised when I got both videos onto the PC.