using final cut pro to edit multiple video streams into one

The more clips that are playing at once, the more places those heads need to jump in order to play each clip. Latency is the time it takes the heads in a spinning hard disk to travel from one spot on the drive to another. A spinning hard disk transfers data around 225 MB/sec.

Successful multicam editing – especially as frame sizes or the number of camera angles increase – requires shifting your storage from spinning media to SSDs. (This, too, varied from about 50 – 75 MB/second.)Įditing multicam clips really taxes storage. However, when I close the Angle Viewer and play the timeline, the bandwidth drops to 50 MB/second. Click the Disk text button at the top, then look at Data Read to monitor data traveling from storage to the CPU. NOTE: You can measure storage bandwidth yourself using Utilities > Activity Monitor. When I edited it, the bandwidth varied from 200 MB/second to 1.2 GB/second, and averaged around 500 MB/second! In this screen shot, Final Cut was using more than 600 MB/second to play this multicam clip (red arrow). I created a multicam clip composed of four 4K clips. All those clips are still there, linked and ready to edit. In other words, Final Cut automatically flattens a multicam clip based on whether the Angle Viewer is open. Even better, if you suddenly realize you need to reedit a multicam clip, simply reopen the Angle Viewer. When the Angle Viewer is closed, so that you only view the clips in the timeline, Final Cut only streams the timeline. When the Angle Viewer is open, displaying all the multicam angles for editing, Final Cut streams all the angles in a multicam clip. For years, I thought that meant that every clip was playing all the time. When you “flatten” a multicam clip, you disconnect all the angles that you don’t need and only play the ones you do. “Write” is data going to storage.įlattening is done at the end of an edit, when you no longer need to see all the different angles. NOTE: “Bandwidth” is the speed data transfers between the storage system and the computer. Multicam requires far more bandwidth, which I’ll illustrate in a second. This is more than enough for any editing up to 4K. This RAID reliably delivers 350 MB/second, or more, of data when I’m editing. This places great demands upon storage bandwidth-especially as frame sizes increase.įor example, I have a four-drive RAID composed of spinning hard disks (because they hold a lot and don’t cost much) that I use for editing.

Unlike “normal” editing, where we view, edit and playback one clip at a time (ignoring, for the moment, visual effects like split screen), multicam editing plays back (“streams”) multiple clips at the same time. It’s a delight to use.īut… one of the features that has always troubled me is that, unlike Final Cut Pro 7 or Adobe Premiere Pro, you can’t flatten the multicam clip when you are done editing. Final Cut Pro is known for the high-quality and high-performance of editing multicam clips.

Using final cut pro to edit multiple video streams into one