- Casablanca Users' Forum -

[Greg Marsh]

admin
I have a dream …

In my dream I am able to take up to four DV camcorders to a shoot, use them all day, pause individual camcorders, switch them off and on, change tapes and batteries … then capture the footage from all camcorders into my editing system and ALL material will be automatically and instantly synchronized. Yea I know ….. Your’e Dreamin’

Let’s take this dream one step further …. Having transferred the footage from my four camcorders into my editing system, I would then be able to play the footage in four separate windows and do a live vision switch between each vision stream. At the end of that process, I would click a button and my timeline or storyboard would be instantly created ……. job done.

Guess what? … I’m not dreamin’.
Very soon, I will be able to do this with any of my Casablanca DV machines (Avio, Prestige or Kron). What makes this miracle possible? A new piece of brilliant software called “Quadcam.”

The second part of my dream, the one where I do the live switching, is not new technology. We had it in the DraCo Nonlinear Workstation seven years ago. And in recent years, the same technology has become available for some of the PC editing systems.

But the first part of my dream, the part about automatically synchronizing the output of up to four camcorders, without the need for clapper boards, flash lights, beeps etc. is a new invention and the worldwide patents are held by MacroSystem.

This technology will not be available to your friend with Final Cut Pro on a Mac. It will not be available to your competitor who edits with Avid, or Pinnacle, or Vegas Video, or Canopus or any of the raft of available PC or Mac based editing systems.
This is a MacroSystem invention and it just made your Casablanca DV machine the HOTTEST video editor in the wedding and event videography world.

So, how does it work?
Like most great inventions, it’s simple. It’s one of those, “Why didn’t somebody think of this before,” ideas. It works like this; Before you go out on a shoot (or immediately after the shoot), you connect each of your camcorders, in turn, to the Casablanca by way of the firewire connection. The Casablanca Quadcam software registers the time settings of each of your camcorders and notes the disparity between each of the camcorders (in milliseconds). This is not based on timecode. The camcorders don’t even need to have tapes in them when the reference is taken. This technology is based on the normal quartz-clock time in each camcorder. Frame precise synchronization is possible because DV camcorders record this time clock information right onto the tape, together with the footage.
So the Casablanca with Quadcam software has all the information it needs to take all of the tapes from all of the cameras and prepare all the footage for perfect frame-accurate synchronization. You don’t even need to use the same camcorder to transfer all the footage onto your Casablanca. It’s the information on the tape that is relevant, not the camcorder.

When you use the live vision switching of Quadcam, it not only places all the scenes and inserts onto the storyboard, instantly. It also creates trimmed copies of all used scenes in the scene bin. And each of these trimmed scenes will have 3-second “handles.” That is, each scene copy will have an additional 3 seconds at the start and 3 seconds at the end, to provide for refining the Quadcam created storyboard.

I guess you can tell that I am excited about this new development. It clearly puts Casablanca streets ahead of the pack in terms of editing multi-camera projects.

It is not released yet, but will be in the coming weeks.

Best regards,

Greg Marsh
DraCo Systems Australia

Richard
AWESOME!!!
The only part that is not clear to me is if the quadcam software will only us to play forward at normal speed or if the trackball etc will allow slow/fast or frame by frame movement forward and back?

admin
I think it all works in real time, Richard (just like a real vision mixer).
We could suggest they incorporate a new button called. "slowmoforoldbuggerswithimpairedreactiontimes."
That would certainly work for me .

BellCam
Presumably this system will work equally well with action that's sequential rather than concurrent eg a rally car from several parts of the course by different cameras.  That is, lay footage from each of the cameras in a combined chronological order.
Graeme

admin
I haven't seen the software myself yet. However, I can see no reason why it wouldn't work the way you describe, provided one camera is kept running for the entire event. The tapes from that camera would provide the main background scene and the material from the other cameras would be used for the inserts.

The way it works in a 4 camera situation is that the material from the three "insert" cameras only plays when the correct timecode comes up. So if there is no footage from an individual camera at a certain point in time, the window for that camera is just displaying black.

The one problem with your scenario would be that you would want the audio from each camera, rather than the "normal" method of using the audio from "Camera 1." So it may be necessary to manually insert the audio from Cameras 2,3 and 4. As I said, I haven't seen the software yet, so it could be that the developers will provide a switch that would allow you to use either audio source.
admin
I now have some further information on the Quadcam method. As you would know, my reference to the "slowmoforoldbuggerswithimpairedreactiontimes" was more than a little tongue-in-cheek. The big difference with live on-the-job switching is that the person doing the switching, directs the camera operators and can call for a particular shot to be held while s/he directs another of the camera operators to re-frame. The live vision switcher usually is also able to see the whole scene, so is able to see what is happening outside of the four currently framed shots. When doing Quadcam vision switching, neither of these aids is available to the switching person. For that reason, Richard's suggestion of being able to scrub through the material in both directions is a valid requirement.

I can now say that such a function will not be available in the first iteration of the software, but may be possible in subsequent iterations. There is already some talk of a pro version of the software that may include this and many other high-end features.

In the meantime, the 3 second handles, referred to in my original post, should take care of most of the switching errors that would result from the Quadcam "live" switching process.

I think the important breakthrough that this software package offers is greatly reduced editing times when preparing and editing multi-camera footage.

One last point; It seems likely that the ability to select audio from either the background track or the insert tracks could also be part of a pro version of the software, at some future time.