PPro CS6, multi-cam edit with second system sound files

[Bruce Watson]

I posted this over on the Adobe forums because sometimes I get answers to the more esoteric problems there. Not this time though, so maybe it's more of a practical problem and I'll get an answer here. I hope.

I've done multi-cam edits before, but always with the audio recorded to camera. I'd just make sure that camera was "video 1" and all the sound carried over to the nested target sequence just fine. Nice and simple.

This time, not so nice, and not so simple. Now I've got two cameras, and 6 channels of audio. I'd like to put this all into the source sequence, sync it all up, then nest it into the target sequence and do a multi-cam edit. But, when I try that (and turn off the on-camera sound, which is worthless), I get no audio at all in the multi-cam monitor. Which makes it amazingly difficult to pick camera angles! I could delete the camera audio from "audio 1" and put one track there which would give me something, but what about the other audio tracks? I can't see any way for them to make it through the multi-cam edit process and end up in the target sequence.

So.... what's the workflow that Adobe wants me to use for this? I can't be the first person to have needed to do this. And I can't figure it out from the docs, and can't find any tutorials on it either. I'm sure there's something out there somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it.

Ah, yes, I'm sure someone will ask. The video is a guy and his guitar outside leaning against his truck singing. The audio is a mic on guitar (mono track), a mic on voice (mono track), a stereo pair because why not, and a stereo pair picking up ambiance. Video and audio were synced together with industry standard clapper sticks. Which is why I need a way to sync the cameras and all those audio tracks together in a single sequence.

When I'm done editing the multi-cam edit and have my camera angles picked out and everything trimmed down the way we want it, I plan to send the audio to Audition to clean up the individual tracks, and mix it all down into a stereo track that gets a little EQ, a little compression, a little reverb, etc. Then it gets sent back to PPro and the client gets a first look.


So, what's the "standard workflow" for a job like this?

 

[Jim Simon]

Put something to hear on A1 in the source sequence. Cut the multicam. When you're done cutting, nest the source sequence into the multicam sequence a second time, only on track 2. Do NOT enable multicam on this second nest.

Delete the video portion of that second nested sequence, and move the audio portion up to A1, overwriting the cut audio. This will act as standard nesting and give you all six tracks.

 

[Bruce Watson]

Put something to hear on A1 in the source sequence. Cut the multicam. When you're done cutting, nest the source sequence into the multicam sequence a second time, only on track 2. Do NOT enable multicam on this second nest.

Delete the video portion of that second nested sequence, and move the audio portion up to A1, overwriting the cut audio. This will act as standard nesting and give you all six tracks.

I can do this, but then I'll have to resync it, and the editing will kill off the clapper footage. It's this situation that I want to avoid. What made Adobe think that the only audio would be camera audio? Sheesh -- second system audio has been used in Hollywood since the beginning of talkies.

There are all kinds of awkward workarounds for this. What I'm hoping to find is the least awkward workaround. If this is it, then this is it. I'm hoping for better, but I haven't found it yet.

As an aside, do any of the other NLEs handle second system audio better than this? I'm going to have to leave Adobe soon, might as well jump to an NLE that handles this kind of work better than Adobe does.

 

[Jim Simon]

You won't have to resync anything. I'm not sure why you'd think you would.