[HN Gopher] Record 4 Camera Angles at Once Using Only iPhones an...
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Record 4 Camera Angles at Once Using Only iPhones and iPads
Author : peutetre
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-07-06 01:24 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcmag.com)
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| As someone who uses Apple's desktop Final Cut Pro app almost
| daily, I've been wondering if they would ever switch to a monthly
| fee as this pro version phone app does.
|
| I think I paid around $350 eight years ago and get regular
| updates for free. I also have Adobe's Premiere on my machine but
| I gravitate toward FCPX and wonder why I still pay Adobe monthly
| for that app. I might add syncing multiple cameras in FCPX is
| pretty easy in post production.
|
| I'm wandering if this is a precursor for the future. Apple
| charging monthly for desktop apps.
| whstl wrote:
| I also wonder the same. I use Logic almost daily, but would
| immediately change to something else if it ever becomes
| subscription-based. Maybe Bitwig and Linux.
| Goofy_Coyote wrote:
| I was a Premiere user, switched to Davinci Resolve a few
| years ago, and never looked back. I still wonder why such a
| great piece of software is free. There's a learning curve
| though - nothing serious, but I had to put in a couple of
| hours to learn how to do things I used to do in Adobe
| Premiere.
|
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve
|
| There's a paid version too, but I doubt anyone who's not
| making REAL money from editing ever needs it.
| talldayo wrote:
| Bitwig is so good, nowadays. I paid full-price for a Studio
| license, and their Linux support is so top-notch that I don't
| feel bad putting money in their pocket. I used to use Logic
| and Ableton, but I don't miss anything from them when I use
| Bitwig.
| Xeyz0r wrote:
| Especially considering that over the past decade software
| monetization has been shifting towards subscription models
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| Just to put this out in the universe: I hope it stays 1-time.
| basisword wrote:
| It keeps you buying high end Macs though, which have gotten
| ridiculously expensive now. That alone seems like a good reason
| for Apple to keep investing in Final Cut and Logic.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I know multiple people still clinging on to their old 2012
| MacPros running FCP7 as HD tape capture systems running OS X
| 10.6. And _ONLY_ for that purpose. If it ain 't broke, don't
| fix it, especially if it requires ripping out all of your
| existing capture devices, switching to USBC/TB4 type
| connectivity.
| adamomada wrote:
| Yah I made a mental note when I saw that setup being used
| in the Tiger King Netflix show (where they show quite a bit
| of behind the scenes of making it). I think it stuck in my
| head just because it was FCP7 but it's like a high quality
| power tool - it doesn't just stop working (unless you break
| it hehe)
| dchuk wrote:
| Realistically though, your $350 one time buy was the equivalent
| of 5.8 years of this version of Final Cut Pro at $4.99/month.
| So while you using it for 8 years busts through the total cost
| of ownership numbers, seems like $4.99 is very reasonable
| monthly.
|
| Plus as a low monthly, it's more likely people will try the app
| out and start creating videos with it, vs having to stomach and
| justify a $350 up front spend.
|
| This all being said: I've never understood the issue with
| subscription software assuming the developers keep iterating on
| it. Seems like that is actually BETTER alignment of usage and
| commercial model than one time buy, because one time buys
| technically don't incentivize the developers to keep iterating
| on software...
| egypturnash wrote:
| You are ignoring the misalignment of user and developer needs
| that happens when the devs spend all their time adding new
| features that mean absolutely nothing to your process; in the
| pre-subscription days I would skip new versions of
| Illustrator that only added stuff for people who do text
| layout or whatever. Now I'm sitting here paying for them to
| spend an entire dev cycle fucking around with text-to-image
| generation garbage I have no use for, like it or not.
| afavour wrote:
| > I've never understood the issue with subscription software
| assuming the developers keep iterating on it
|
| That also assumes the iteration provides value to me as a
| customer.
|
| I bought a license for Sketch years ago. It expired.
| Thankfully Sketch provide old versions for download so I'm
| still on version whatever-it-is... and it does everything I
| need. I know there's new functionality but I'm not really
| interested in it.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Dave Lee (aka dave2d) had a YouTube review touching on this
| feature of using an ipad pro (2024) with final cut pro to record
| 4 streams of video and replace a streamdeck + mac + OBS setup a
| month ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bG2N4a0ir3A&t=626
|
| (Just referencing, not really my area of interest)
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Syncing audio and video timing for multicam is so difficult that
| it generally requires onsite highly paid camera operators to
| manage.
|
| I wonder what magic they used (and what underlying data format
| for the video) to make this sync magic happen.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| When you think about it's actually pretty ridiculous that this
| difficult in the first place, in the internet era. In principle
| all you really need is a standard way to tag each keyframe with
| an NTP-synced timestamp, and any camera with an internet
| connection would be able to achieve this effortlessly.
| fwip wrote:
| NTP time skew can be on the order of 100ms. If the
| audio/video is desynced by 30ms, it can definitely be
| noticeable. Some people are more sensitive than others, and
| it also depends on the particulars of the content.
|
| Edit: Another commenter points out that in some situations,
| it's even necessary to align the time that the frames start,
| which necessarily requires sub-frame precision.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| It's almost never going to be that bad unless you're going
| out over a terrible internet connection. Worst case you
| could have a way to configure one camera to run its own NTP
| server and have the others sync to it over LAN. That would
| get you sub-frame (<1ms) precision easily.
| solardev wrote:
| Is NTP precise enough for this? I thought timestamps are
| usually in milliseconds, but audio sampling rates can be
| fractions of a millisecond? If you're off by a little, won't
| it create weird echoes or interference in the sound ?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Sound travels at 1 foot per millisecond roughly (standard
| atmospheric conditions).
|
| So a soundfeed with multiple microphones several feet apart
| already have this issue.
| solardev wrote:
| But that's actually part of the signal (useful
| information), isn't it, like for stereo or spatial
| recording setups? Presumably each performer or
| instrument's delay is a function of its distance to
| different microphones.
|
| vs NTP-introduced errors, which are just noise and not
| part of the intentional recording?
| adamomada wrote:
| Oh c'mon there are people who have thought about it for more
| than the ten seconds you have and it's not feasible and not
| effortless - you want to give every cam an internet gateway??
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| this drove me insane back in ~2004/2005 as a longtime-NTP-
| loving sysadmin who was doing tech for an indie film company.
| they were ingesting tons of multicam MiniDV into FCP and
| their timecode discipline was NOT good. there was no simple
| answer to this back then, pure manual work. truly is kind of
| bonkers it has taken until ~2024 to solve this (kinda).
| milleramp wrote:
| Modern cameras are using PTP for synchronization.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Camera tech and syncing has become almost trivial. You can do
| shoots with a mix of cameras all feeding back to a central
| place without any kind of sync between them all without running
| any kind of sync.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| Dumb/ignorant question:
|
| I'm under impression that the "clack" used at the beginning of
| the stereotypical film take functions as a sound spike that
| multiple reels of film from different angles can be
| synchronized on - assuming I'm not way off base here, what
| about syncing audio/video on modern digital devices is more
| difficult?
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's a different type of sync than that. Syncing multicameras
| would ensure the scanning of each camera is aligned so that
| the start of a frame is at the same time on each camera.
| Traditionally, you needed cameras that had the ability to
| accept a sync reference signal provided from a sync generator
| by running a dedicated cable _to_ each camera as well as all
| of the other video equipment like switchers, Chyron, VTRs,
| etc. In the bad old days, if you tried to switch between two
| cameras that were not in sync, you 'd get a very unclean cut
| as the H/V sync between sources were not aligned.
|
| Today, switching equipment just "re-stripes" the timing from
| each input. The need for a house reference is not necessary
| with modern prosumer gear. For broadcast still supporting
| interlaced HD, they still run that reference cable.
| gorkish wrote:
| It's not hard; it's just kept behind a very thin veil of 'pro'
|
| Timecode server and recorders that sink timecode are literally
| all you need. Everything has been standardized for multiple
| decades.
|
| Truthfully, anymore even this is starting to become
| unnecessary; most NLE's can just figure it out from the regular
| metadata and autocorrelation to sync the clocks. Just dump it
| in the timeline and everything lines up.
| solardev wrote:
| Is that still the case these days? I filmed a multi cam
| performance a few weeks ago with an Android phone, a PC laptop,
| and an iPad. The software (Premiere and others) was able to
| automatically sync them up just by analyzing their waveforms
| and lining them up. (You just drag the clips into a timeline
| and then right-click to sync them... it takes a few seconds to
| process but it's all automatic)
|
| It was good enough that the audio lined up perfectly except in
| cases where a performer was standing next to one microphone and
| far from the other one, which created a noticeable echo delay
| in stereo. But I think that's just the speed of sound at work,
| not the software's fault.
|
| My understanding is that this is a normal feature in video apps
| these days, to the point that a lot of older standalone time
| sync apps are no longer for sale because it's all built-in now.
| I'm not a professional in this space though, just someone
| recording amateur videos for a music class.
| lsy wrote:
| Is there a streaming-native way of encoding multiple camera
| angles _simultaneously_ in a video? The ability to toggle between
| different angles is a feature on DVDs and Blu-rays that IMO is
| underused but awesome for educational videos where different
| aspects or angles of a demonstration might be useful.
| Goofy_Coyote wrote:
| On Mac, I'm using Continuity Camera with an older extra iPhone
| I have + Elgato Cam Link to hook in a DSLR. Then I use OBS
| Studio to mash them all together, you can then use some plugins
| to switch between cameras live while streaming (or recording).
|
| Hope it helps
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| Youtube has multi-stream capability and I've seen one streamer
| use it years ago to let you pick which multiplayer user to
| spectate. I assume they used separate streams inside in the
| .m3u8 file used for HLS, much like how you'd do different
| resolutions. Haven't seen it done in years.
|
| .mkv files natively support adding an arbitrary number of video
| tracks, though player support is kind of rare. (it's _ by
| default to cycle video tracks in mpv)
| rzzzt wrote:
| MP4 containers also support multiple video tracks.
| RIMR wrote:
| Any camera with an accurate clock can record video timestamped so
| that the exact time of each frame can be known.
|
| Why do we need proprietary stuff like this when we already have a
| tried and true method for syncing multicamera shots?
|
| The iPhone and iPad should be perfectly capable of this. Every
| video you take should be compatible, and pooling videos from
| multiple people should allow you to sync and sequence the videos
| properly.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > when we already have a tried and true method for syncing
| multicamera shots?
|
| please inform me of these tried and true methods that allow you
| to take a mobile device that is not a dedicated camera and make
| it part of a multicam shoot. this is one of those things that
| shows how against status quo you might be. this kind of thing
| opens up multicam shoot to sooooo many more people than even
| BlackMagic's ATEM equipment did. People wanting to do
| traditional mutlticam shoots and all of the procedural
| nightmare that comes with that are free to continue doing it.
| Using something like this allows for so much more flexibility
| it strains credulity that you're unable to see it.
| amelius wrote:
| > Why do we need proprietary stuff like this when we already
| have a tried and true method for syncing multicamera shots?
|
| Because thanks to Apple, everybody and their mother can do it.
|
| The question is then, why is this on HN?
| samspenc wrote:
| Somewhat related to this topic, Move.AI https://www.move.ai/ does
| something very similar but specifically for 3D 'markerless'
| motion-capture (MoCap) data. You can use iPhones, smartphone or
| recently any inexpensive network-connectable camera to get
| synchronized video from multiple sources, and then use that
| sync'd footage and their service to get accurate MoCap animation
| without needing expensive MoCap suits or hardware.
|
| Plask.ai and Rokoko Vision do something similar, but only support
| 1 camera afaik, so their camera-based MoCap is less accurate than
| Move.ai's multi-camera solution.
| dchuk wrote:
| Anyone know if you can combine this multi cam feature with an
| external camera source connected to the iPad? So let's say you
| have a canon camera hooked up by usbc to Final Cut and that's
| your iPad's camera, and then you have an iPhone as your second
| camera? If so, this can really be quite the portable high end
| recording solution for podcasters and YouTubers...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| do you think final cut camera will support pro photography or
| will there be a pro camera app?
| crb wrote:
| The live remote camera setup seems like the bones of the only
| killer app idea I've ever had: a two-iPhone camera system for
| couples who want a stranger to take a picture of them while
| they're on holiday.
|
| It would work like this:
|
| - hand volunteer a phone and ask them to point it at you
|
| - direct the shot by looking at the second phone ("no, stand
| further back, not our legs, don't point it directly at the sun")
|
| - put the second phone in your pocket
|
| - have the stranger take the photo you actually want, saving you
| rounds of back and forth when they say "Is this OK?"
|
| Has anyone ever seen an app like this?
| brrrrrm wrote:
| Apple watch has this feature
| dharma1 wrote:
| I wish Resolve could record multiple video/audio input sources at
| once - like a video DAW.
|
| 4K HDMI -> USB capture devices are so cheap these days. Yes you
| can record on the cameras, transfer and sync but it's friction
| ukuina wrote:
| I tried this last weekend and it was anything but smooth. Many
| discovery/connection issues, and only two of the four devices
| sent over anything except the highly compressed "preview" stream,
| and they wouldn't send the final copy no matter what I tried. Had
| to make do with the lower quality videos to get the edit out
| quickly.
|
| Bonus: FCP on iPad would keep throwing a blocking error stating
| it couldn't get the final streams every sixty seconds or so, for
| the entire duration of my editing and long after the other
| devices had left the vicinity. It seems the FCP project is
| somehow tainted by this.
|
| Next time, I'll just record separate videos from all of them and
| use Resolve to sync via audio analysis to create a new multicam
| video.
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(page generated 2024-07-08 23:00 UTC)