Home Recording Video - iMovie w/2 cameras

keith.rogers

Well-known member
In the spirit of home recording, this is something I recorded yesterday afternoon and then used iMovie this morning to put together. 2 cameras, one straight-through take of the song with me playing/singing (2 cameras), as it were, and then a take each of the solos (1 camera). All the audio was recorded on my Mac Mini and mixed down there.

Then, I put the main video from both cameras into iMovie, lined them up using their audio tracks, and then sync'd the mixed audio to it, zeroing the videos' audio tracks. Next I added the solo videos and lined those up using their audio. Final, tedious steps were getting the cuts/transitions in place while keeping the alignments - that took a couple tries, so I think I'll revert back to Final Cut Pro and create multi-cam videos from the start and play with the cuts there, though I'm not sure it will work with the short solos in the main audio (main reason I decided to try iMovie).

Anyway, mistakes here and there, but for a proof of concept by an old goat, I'm Ok with it...

YouTube
 
Thanks for the looks and comments folks. I just got such a kick out of that song I had to try. Not Tommy Emmanuel (duh), but I can get some friends to play along with this version! (The fiddler likes it better without the capo ;))
 
. Final, tedious steps were getting the cuts/transitions in place while keeping the alignments - that took a couple tries, so I think I'll revert back to Final Cut Pro and create multi-cam videos from the start and play with the cuts there,

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Hi Keith Rogers: in what little time I've been on this forum, I appreciate your good advice and I like the video I just watched very much!
I see it's a few years ago already, and I'd wager you've found a better way for multi-camera recording. That's what I'm after.

I wonder if by now we can simply hook up two or three cameras to iMovie or another program, and simultaneously get some better quality audio on Garage band (or if need be, a better program) I'm mostly a PC guy, but I bought a Mac Pro to sway garage band files with an old guitarist friend down south.

...anyway, what choices for cameras have you discovered?

Thanks a lot - Jon
 
Thanks Rob - I can do that a little better after watching a few tips here.

How about cameras? It seems cell phones have taken over for so many musicians.
My wife used a canon sure shot which is just a small hand held camera with reasonable storage for short videos.

I want to buy two or more video cameras that work well uploading to iMovie.

But now I want to capture three musicians playing at the same time, focusing on what they are doing in the studio.
...and one camera should be mounted up high on the wall.

What do people do who create those multi-camera views ?
 
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You shoot on as many cameras as you have, then bring them individually into the editor. If they have HDMI outputs you could switch live on something like an ATEM Mini Pro - but just shoot on what you have. With iPhones double check they are set to the same frame rates - iPhones can shoot at all sorts of fps settings which plays havoc with an edit as they drift out of sync. It helps enormously to stand somewhere all cameras can see you and clap your hands - a simple sync point for the edit.
 
Been away for a while. Boy, 3 years ago. Things have changed since then.

I will say that I rarely use iMovie now because Final Cut Pro (FCP) just has a few features that made me take the leap. When I did that I was doing some recordings in clubs which required me to place cameras in essentially inaccessible (during sets, at least) locations and let them run, then hope for the best when I got home to see what I had. I never had the luxury of having extra people on extra cameras - well, on any camera most of the time. So it was just a bunch of static placements.

But, there are different problems when you are recording a live performance where the cameras will have an audio track that is essentially similar to what you're recording. Alignment then is fairly easy, and some apps like FCP can create a combined file ("multi-cam clip") that included all video plus the mixed audio. When it worked, and that was 95% of the time probably, it was great. Otherwise it was back to visual sync.

It gets more complicated when you don't have video with a common audio track.

I've dialed back quite a bit but new smartphones are very capable video recorders. Where you can run into problems is their tendency to auto-correct (focus, white balance especially) but in a stable lighting environment, I use my older iPhone for some video lessons I'm taking, and it looks fine with sufficient lighting. Camcorders typically have better (real) low-light capability, but get spendy. I never made the leap to 4k, which is all I'd look at today - it would open up a lot of capabilities to add "movement" into videos by doing Ken Burns-like panning/zooming/etc. and still end up with good HD. Shooting 1080 limits how much you can do. If you look at multiple camcorders, I would get same make and similar models so the color settings look very close if not the same when you do manual white balance (which you always want to do).

I tried using [free] OBS for streaming with a couple of cameras and while I could get them and the audio sync'd I couldn't get the quality of the audio where I liked - probably didn't fiddle enough.
 
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I tried using [free] OBS for streaming with a couple of cameras and while I could get them and the audio sync'd I couldn't get the quality of the audio where I liked - probably didn't fiddle enough.
Behringer Usb mixer directly into an iphone just using the iphone camera works good enough for my live stuff...just edited / clipped in movie maker. This was last year Merry Christmas

 
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