Mitch Jacobson, an Avid editor who specializes in multi-camera productions, presented to the Tampa Avid user Group meeting on October 20th at Osceola Fundamental High School. Mitch, who's productions have been nominated twice for national Emmy Awards™, talked about his work and showed multi-camera clips from the concert film Aerosmith: You Gotta Move. Mitch has over 25 years experience cutting network TV programs and concert films for A&E, PBS, CBS, Discovery and E! He is the author of an upcoming book published by Focal Press entitled: Mastering Multi-Camera Editing. Mitch gave practical advice such as the importance of organizing and clip-naming workflows. He talked about some common ways of syncing cameras such a source timecode and in-points. Imagine trying to organize and edit with 18 different camera views. With Media Composer, you can view and edit multiple cameras in real-time "on-the-fly" or by starting and stopping the action to carefully chose the shots. You can group them together so it's easier to find the exact angle that you want. Working on rock concerts has its own special challenges as Mitch explained. Not only did he have to handle 18 different camera angles but also add in footage from multiple concert nights. The audio might be better on one of the concert evenings while the lighting may be better on another night. Mitch's presentation was captivating and appealed to the students and the professionals in the audience. We especially enjoyed the Steven Tyler impersonations.
On Tuesday, Mitch presented to another group of over 80 students and professionals in Orlando. Full Sail Universisty and Avid hosted a mini workshop featuring Mitch's multicamera workflows. Mitch spoke for over 2 hours and spent extra time fielding questions regarding sync issues, audio and codecs. The group was especially interested in dealing with music concerts and working with inexpensive cameras that are problematic for timecode sync. Sync issues are a staple of Mitch's presentation but, this time he shared some additional ways to sync cameras like: handclaps, flashlights and digital camera flash's. For hard to sync cameras he stressed the use of Lock-It Boxes which send timecode to auxilliary audio tracks or external sync inputs. The Avid can translate audio timecode to SMPTE Timecode for an easy way to group multiple cameras. Because the group was interested in music projects, Mitch shared a preview from his upcoming book Mastering Multi-Camera Editing that deals with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing on PBS Great Performances. The director of the TV program uses the music score as a script for the concert. He puts all of his camera notes directly into the music sheets, notating things such as instrument solos and big composer movements. The score is shared by the assistant director with non-music reading crew members with camera shot sheets. In post, editors and producers refer to "The Book" as a reference to the director's notes to edit the show.
