Multicam #1 Mistake
One thing you should always remember, when you’re working with multiclips, you can’t render your sequence. Once you’ve rendered, you’ll only be able to see one clip in the viewer when playing the sequence, which defeats the purpose of multiclips.
If you need to render your multiclip, either your sequence settings are wrong, or your hard drive is causing a bottleneck, whether it’s from drive speed or connection speed, or you just need a faster computer/more RAM.
Also, somewhat related, once your multiclip edit is complete and you’re ready to add filters, etc., and do your final render for export, don’t forget to collapse your multiclip. In fact, you should collapse it as soon as your shots are chosen. You can always uncollapse it, and you can still roll, slip, and slide edit points even when it’s collapsed, but once you start adding filters and rendering, you’ll be effecting and rendering all the clips in your multiclip. If you have 5 angles, it will take 5 times as long to render. Get it?
Thanks for the tip. Can I ask you about the hard drive bottleneck issue? I have a six camera multicam live performance to edit. I shot it in full HD and the clips are in ProRes now. In the past I have done the same with SD clips and things went smoothly. But the HD clips won’t play smoothly. Right now I have all my clips on one external drive with a FW400 connection. I suspect that’s my issue? I have two other drives, so I could spread the clips onto these and use them all at once. I do have an eSATA adapter for my MBP, but I can’t get it to work. I appreciate your help.
Michael, the more streams of video you have, the more your drives have to read and move simultaneously. And the higher resolution & bitrate, the more of a strain that puts on your system. So, just like your ProRes clips are larger than the SD clips you used to use, you need to have faster drives and more bandwidth for that information to pass in real time.
If you’re doing 6 tracks of ProRes, you’re going to need much more than a FW400 drive. You’re going to want at least a 2-drive RAID setup, and you’re going to want to get that eSATA adapter working for your connection. FW isn’t going to be fast enough, even FW800.
Thanks, Travis–I appreciate the advice. I figured that was the problem. Time to go shopping…
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