MultiCams vs Merged Clips in Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a powerful editing tool, and one of its greatest strengths are its incredibly adaptable sequences, especially the MultiCam. You might have no idea what a MultiCam is, and that’s okay! Because in this article you’re going to learn all about what makes them so great, and how they compare to the Merged Clips feature.

What are MultiCams?

You’ve been hearing this term MultiCam, but what are we even talking about? Well, when you have footage from one source, and audio from another source, you need a way to sync them up, so that they stay connected while you are editing. Traditionally, you might think a merged clip sounds like exactly what you’d want to use, but there’s another better way to do this, and that’s to create a MultiCam. So let’s break down the differences between these two options, and figure out how they stack up against each other.

Combining Footage

The first important thing to know about MultiCams versus Merged Clips is the amount of video and audio you can combine. With Merged Clips, you can combine one video source and as many audio sources as you want. This means if you were filming with one camera and multiple audio sources, such as a boom microphone, a lavalier, and the on-camera audio, you can combine all of that audio together with one source of video. But if you were filming with two or more cameras, such as working on a scene with many characters at once, or conducting an interview or filming a music performance, you would not be able to merge all of those video clips together.

That’s where MultiCams come in – they can combine as many video and audio sources as you want. This is especially important if you want to use the powerful MultiCam camera switching tools in Premiere to pick the camera angle you want to view, and even cut between them during live playback.

Modifying Clips

Not only can you use MultiCams to sync one source of footage and audio, it’s also possible to actually adjust your MultiCam after you’ve created it. Once you create a merged clip, you are unable to modify it – it’s basically like a brand new clip in your bin and you can’t change it. So if you accidentally misaligned the audio and the video, or want to swap out an audio recording,  that won’t be possible without actually recreating the entire merged clip. This can be especially problematic if you’ve already cut this clip into your sequence.

On the other hand, MultiCams are essentially just nested sequences with some fancy settings. So once you make a MultiCam, you can choose to open in timeline, allowing you to see the contents of the MultiCam and modify them as needed. If you do a lot of syncing on projects you work on, you need to have that kind of adaptability in your workflow to change things after the fact, especially if you work on non-narrative projects where you might be discovering what video clips sync to which audio clips as you go along.

Metadata

Next, let’s consider how metadata is preserved and used when you create Merged Clips or MultiCams. There are two key pieces of metadata that editors like and your color and sound vendors need for a successful collaboration:

• Tape name (or Reel name). You may have seen this term on the relinking offline media screen. This piece of metadata is great for helping software like Premiere and DaVinci Resolve successfully relink from transcoded media (what you might edit with) to the full resolution camera masters that you might be using for color grading.
• IXML tags. These are stored in your professionally recorded audio files. This information tells you what each track in your audio file is, and although Premiere unfortunately doesn’t have a simple way to view this information in the timeline, software like Pro Tools does, and sound mixers use that to help them sort and organize on their end.

Merged Clips effectively make brand new clips in your bin, and in doing so, Premiere strips out some of this information. Things like the IXML track names and the original audio file name are no longer available, so if you created an OMF or AAF file to do a turnover to your sound team, they wouldn’t receive that information from the audio you have connected to your merged clips. There are workarounds to get the information connected again, but in this case it’s easier skip Merged Clips altogether because MultiCams will retain that important information for you all the way through your edit.

Once you are done editing with MultiCams and are ready to send your sequence to the sound team, you can simply flatten your MultiCams, which will get rid of them in your timeline and replace them with the original audio or original video that was inside of them. This makes doing turnovers to your sound team really easy because all of that metadata is going to come along with your files now.

Match Frame

And that brings us to another very important editing tool, match frame. Match frame is a vital tool in your editing arsenal. If you aren’t using it right now, here’s a quick refresher: in your timeline, hover your play head over a clip. The default shortcut key for Match Frame in Premiere is F. That will load the clip you were hovering over into the source monitor, but unlike simply double clicking on the clip in the timeline to load it into the source, Premiere went into the bin and loaded the clip into the source monitor with the in and out points set to match what you have in your timeline.

At this point, you can only imagine the power this tool provides – we use it about 500 times a day for various different purposes. Fortunately, Match Frame works great with both Merged Clips and MultiCams, but with caveats. When you use match frame to load a merged clip into your source monitor, you have all of the same great tools at your disposal. You can cut this clip into your timeline, drag just the video or just the audio, and change in and out points. However, if for some reason you needed to get back to the original footage that was used to create that merged clip, you wouldn’t be able to very easily.

MultiCams however, can take match frame one step further. Once you use match frame to load the MultiCam into your source monitor, you can press match frame a second time, and that will take you inside the MultiCam and load the actual video source into your source monitor. Now, you are probably wondering ‘Why would I ever want to do that?’ Well, it depends entirely on your workflow, but you might have a need to quickly find the bin of footage from that day of filming as you were hunting down a clip that you need.

That’s easy with MultiCams, because you can match frame from the timeline to the source, match frame from the MultiCam source to the original video source, and then right click and choose reveal in project. And voila! We’re looking at the bin containing the original footage that was contained inside of the MultiCam, along with all of the other video clips from that day of filming. We do this often when we need to export video files for VFX vendors, as we want to make sure we’re pulling from the original source footage to send out. So you can indeed use match frame on both Merged Clips and on MultiCams. However, if you need even more functionality within Premiere, MultiCams will let you take match frame one step further, and reveal the actual source footage.

Working in the Timeline

How do MultiCams work in your timeline compared to Merged Clips? Well, the good news is that they work just like any regular clip in your timeline. However, there is one finicky thing you should be aware of with MultiCams: if you edit with a MultiCam in your timeline, and you should happen to unlink the audio from the video, Premiere can get a little bit confused about what those audio clips are, since they are technically still a MultiCam, but they are also just a nested sequence.

If you double click on audio that has been unlinked from its video, it’ll take you inside the MultiCam timeline. You don’t really ever need to double-click on any clips in your Premiere timeline to bring up things like the effects controls, so if you’ve developed a no double-clicking muscle memory, you probably won’t ever run into this problem, but it’s worth knowing just in case.

Wrap Up

So which is better, MultiCams or Merged Clips? For us at Film Editing Pro, MultiCams are the clear winner. they offer the kind of flexibility that we need to keep projects organized, and allow us to scale up as the project progresses.

If you are an editor who is working by yourself in a vacuum and you don’t plan to do any turnovers to sound, color, or VFX, then Merged Clips will probably work just fine. But if you are are often collaborating with many different departments in post-production, you’ll want to develop a workflow that doesn’t remove important metadata from clips, and allows you the most flexibility to adapt and change things as you go.

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