Slice-X and MultiCam Work-Around

Happy holidays to all!

I was just curious how people in the forum have been working with multicam clips on projects using Slice-X tracking.

The use of multicam on these projects has been slowing me down as I try to go through to find the source footage needed for the tracking shots.

Has anyone come up with a clever way to match back quickly from a multicam clip?

Also, I'd like to suggest we ALL send Apple our feedback to fix this limitation for multicam and compound clips.
It would be great if they return from vacation with hundreds of feedback notices on this topic.

Sorry I might be foggy in the mind but not quite understanding your issue. You have a multicam edit, and you're using slice x are you using it on the individual tracks or on the MC edited version.

Thanks DF

Scott Markowitz wrote: I was just curious how people in the forum have been working with multicam clips on projects using Slice-X tracking.

The use of multicam on these projects has been slowing me down as I try to go through to find the source footage needed for the tracking shots.

Has anyone come up with a clever way to match back quickly from a multicam clip?

Also, I'd like to suggest we ALL send Apple our feedback to fix this limitation for multicam and compound clips...

Yes you are correct there are many limitations in the current FCPX multicam. You cannot stabilize or apply optical flow smoothing to a multicam clip. You can't use a tracking plugin like SliceX on multicam. You can't use Auditions on multicam. You can't even use FCPX stabilization on a single-cam synchronized clip, although 3rd party Lock & Load stabilization works in that case.

By contrast with Premiere CC you just apply stabilization, tracking or optical flow directly to the MC clip.

The workaround for FCPX is onerous. It involves:

1. Select clip on timeline
2. Shift+F to locate clip in event browser
3. CMD+1 to select event browser
4. Note clip begin/end time code and write them down
5. Double-click on clip in event browser to open in angle editor
6. In angle editor press CTRL+P and type in the timecode you wrote down
7. Blade that section of the clip, the apply stabilization
8. Return to main timeline
9. If stabilization needs adjusting (parameters aren't available in Inspector for MC clip), then do it all again.
10. Repeat entire process for every MC clip requiring stabilization, optical flow, or tracking.

Thank you Joema for sharing your work around.

It's silly that you would have to write anything down.

We all need to report this to Apple as being a huge gap.

I don't know where you got this supposedly necessary workaround.
This is bogus.
You can apply stabilization in the angle editor.
I don't know about SliceX, because I don't have it, but I'd be surprised if it can't be applied it in the angle editor too.

lichinho wrote: I don't know where you got this supposedly necessary workaround.
This is bogus. You can apply stabilization in the angle editor...

The workaround IS applying stabilization in the angle editor. However you must isolate the matching clip range that corresponds to the MC clip range you want to stabilize, which is what the workaround itemizes. The complexity comes (a) From doing this for every clip requiring stabilization, or optical flow or SliceX tracking, and (b) Inability to fine-tune stabilization parameters without going back into the AE every single time you tweak the controls.

If there is a faster or easier way, I'd like to hear it but this question has been posted and discussed here many times and I don't recollect seeing anything.

If there was some easy way that allowed stabilization, optical flow, Audition, and SliceX tracking to work directly in a MC clip, the lead editor of Focus would not be complaining about it.

The thing is, if you only want to apply stabilization to part of a clip, (if you don't have time to analyze the whole clip, or if a part you aren't using is really shaky and would mess up the stabilization) you need the timecode to figure out where to blade the clip inside the angle editor. this problem could easily be fixed if an i-o selection/playhead position on a clip stayed when you opened it in the angle editor.

edit - joema already answered this I guess.

this would indeed be no problem at all if the playhead would stay on the same frame when opening a multicam clip in the Angle editor. I remember this issue also used to exist with compound clips, and they have fixed it relatively fast. I wouldn't be surprised if this got fixed quite soon for multicam clips as well. Anyway, there is no harm in sending feedback.

- Ronny