I did, indeed, last week. It wasn’t an easy decision as I had toyed with the idea of getting Apple’s flagship video editing suite for a few years now with the excuse that my editing skills leave much to be desired.
The impetus for the purchase was a video project of me and two friends covering SCANDAL’s 「お願いナビゲーション」. I have done a few cover vids thus far on iMovies, some with four camera angles. But this video had up to 14 but, in the end, from a creative perspective, I cut it down to nine. I didn’t think it was worth putting too much effort in a video edit like this on iMovie. The current FCPX is GBP229 a whack and with some trepidation, I relented and clicked the blue button. And hope that this wouldn’t be a mistake.
It wasn’t.
If you had used iMovie before, FCPX was somewhat similar to the extent of the basic layout of the library system, the browsers and the viewer.
The first thing I had to learn was how to do multicamera editing and off I went to the best place to learn this – YouTube.
Now, with iMovie I had to choose on a camera angle as the main video for my storyline, which I had to sync with the edited audio track, and layer on the other edited camera angles one by one, bearing in mind with each camera angle I had to sync that with the audio too. With multicam editing, FCPX can actually auto sync all the camera angles but as my original videos are bereft of an audio track, I still had to sync each video. This is not a real problem as I only need to sync each video just the once. Once synced the storyline for the multicam videos should look like this:
Once the vids are synced, you can view it as a linear storyline and the first thing I did was (which was a tad brave, but I did it on a copy project) edit on the fly as a director of a live telecast would do. There will be a separate multicam viewer which allows you to decide on which angle to use for a particular part of the song, and it was all done in 4 minutes. Fine tuning the multicam edit was right easy too – you could replace the camera angles or lengthen/shorten the segment of the chosen angle. This bit is rather important especially if the cuts should match bits of the song to allow the ‘story’, as it were, to flow nicely in the final cut[1]. And of course, my favourite part of any video edit – colour correction. With FCPX, it feels like the world is your oyster as it is like doing colour correction on Photoshop! However, there are some bits in FCPX that I need to be careful with as I still couldn’t figure out to get rid of the colour correction at a much later stage if I decide to change my mind[2].
Once I was happy with the multicam portion of the project which is essentially the gist of the video I was making, I began adding on the beginning and end of the main storyline little cuts of the band members, and adding titles and soundbites. The beauty of video editing is the ability of adding sounds which were not present in the original video recording and making it look like the sounds were all there in the first place[3].
And here it is, in all her teal and orange glory[4]:
On completing this project, I found that I barely scratched the surface when it comes to the power of FCPX[5]. You may say after looking at this, I could’ve done it with iMovie as I didn’t employ the full bells ‘n’ whistles FCPX has to offer, but that’s not the point, is it?
Please look forward to more videos from me in the future, as I am so looking forward to making more of them!
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[1]I have no background in video editing, so forgive the lack of jargon. Heh.
[2]I am a n00b, never admitted to know much anyway.
[3]Not telling as it will spoil the enjoyment of watching the final video.
[4]It’s a Michael Bay Transformers thing. ^^
[5]To anyone saying Adobe Premiere FTW, please send in my direction GBP2000. Please.
