[ Updated Jan. 13, 2025, with more details on NLEs and multicam. ]
A common question I get in my emails is “What’s the best [fill in the blank]?” The search for the “best” is a quest that drives many of us. But, as we’ve learned over many, many years of technological change, the “best” is, at best, relative.
I was thinking about that this morning. I had just finished editing my DaVinci Resolve Multicam webinar, so multicam was on my mind. I was pondering the differences between multicam in the three NLEs I know the best.
It probably won’t surprise you that the answer is: “It depends…”
WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON
All three provide the ability to view multiple streams of video all playing at the same time, allowing you to switch between streams in real-time – similar to directing a live show – or make considered changes by precisely positioning the playhead before making an edit.
In terms of editing and trimming clips all three systems are identical.
In other words, for simple multicam editing the three systems are the same.
KEY GATING FACTORS
There are five gating factors that determine how well your system can handle multicam editing:
NLE. Final Cut is the most efficient multicam editor. Premiere is the least efficient. Resolve is in the middle. None of the three fully take advantage of all the power your computer and storage make available.
Intel vs. Apple. Apple silicon computers totally outpace Intel systems. Given the same media, Intel systems can process about 30% of the streams supported by Apple silicon.
Codec. On a Mac, ProRes is the most efficient codec for both source media or proxies. H.264 and HEVC are the least efficient; supporting roughly 1/3 the number of files of ProRes. Other codecs fall within that range.
Frame size/frame rate. The larger the frame size (HD, 4K, 6K, 8k), or the faster the frame rate (24, 30, 50, 60 fps), the fewer streams that can play at once.
Storage type and speed. Hard disk drives (HDD) and HDD RAIDs are very limited for multicam playback because of the time required to reposition the drive heads from one file to another. (This delay is called “latency”.) Latency increases as the stream count increases. Adding more drives does not decrease latency. When an HDD plays only one file there’s plenty of time for the heads to move around the disk. But when more than one file is playing, the heads spend more time jumping from one file to the next than they do playing files.
SSDs blow the doors off HDDs for multicam editing, regardless of which NLE you use because they have no latency. Let me get specific.
The bars indicate the maximum number of multicam streams (camera angles) that can be edited in each NLE without dropping frames. While each NLE handles multicam editing differently, in all cases the SSD is faster. Much, much faster!
The maximum speed of Thunderbolt 3/4 (2,850 MB/s) is the hard upper limit – so far – of how many streams an SSD or SSD RAID can support.
NOTE: Thunderbolt 5 has just started to ship. It promises to double the maximum bandwidth available for data. However, no NLE currently in the market fills a Thunderbolt 3/4 pipe, much less Thunderbolt 5.
WHERE THEY DIFFER
These three NLEs differ in the details, which may, or may not, matter to you.
Apple Final Cut Pro. Final Cut is the most efficient, it also has the cleanest and most flexible interface. In my tests, I was able to stream 4K and 8K media at the full speed of Thunderbolt 3/4 with no dropped frames. FCP also has a unique “Smart Flatten.” When the multicam camera panel is open, all streams play. When this panel is closed, only the timeline images play. This means that you no longer need to flatten a multicam clip to reduce the stress on your storage.
Adobe Premiere Pro. Premiere is wired into the Adobe eco-system. While this doesn’t affect multicam editing per se, multicam is part of a larger post-production process, where accessing other tools is often necessary. In my tests, I also found that Premiere was the most restricted in the number of media streams it could support without dropping frames. While I could push Final Cut up to 40 4K streams, Premiere maxed out around 25 4K ProRes streams.
Premiere also offers the unique ability to access all audio channels from all multicam streams, which is a great help in audio mixing. The other two work best when the audio track is complete.
DaVinci Resolve. Resolve includes all the power of the Fairlight and Color pages. I have not tested its multicam performance as intensively as the other two NLEs, but, it easily handled 25 streams of 4K video during a live webinar stream. However, it is impossible to know for sure how reliable multicam is, because the dropped frame indicators must be turned off for multicam to work in Resolve.
SUMMARY
There’s no perfect NLE – but you already knew that. However, if multicam is in your future, pick the NLE that best meets your overall needs. If anything holds you back, it won’t be the multicam portion of your edit.
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12 Responses to Multicam Editing: Comparing Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve
One beef I have with FCP multicam is that there doesn’t seem to be a way of seeing all angles while also seeing the scopes. Or am I missing something? And do the other NLEs have that option?
Thanks & best wishes.
J
Jeremy:
Sorry for the delay, I had to do some homework. FCP and Resolve do not allow you to see both scopes and all multicam angles. Premiere does, but not by default. You will need to undock the Lumetri scopes and, ideally, move them to a second monitor to see the scopes properly.
Larry
Back when I had to edit three-source webinars for a living, I used to set up multi cam in Final Cut Pro and put the playback in higher than realtime speed, using jkl keys, slapping the 123 keys on the fly like a live switcher. FCP allowed me to bop my way through a preliminary edit of a 90 minute training show in about forty minutes that way, using 2k sources on spinning drive raids. It was a thing of beauty and amazed my office peers to see. I could do it that way because of the format of the live camera work always using wide shots to open a section, tight shots for the main point, and a medium for the summary of each section. After I had done the first pass that way, I could go back and tweak the client- supplied slide deck to make it more polished. It was crazy how none of my brother editors would ever try multicam, and they would take two days to do the same edit I could kick out in one afternoon without breaking a sweat. That’s the power of working in multicam.
Mark:
As a former live television director, I LOVE multicam! (While I’ve never tried your trick of 2X thru a multicam edit, there was more than one program where I wish I could have done this in realtime as well!)
Thanks,
Larry
Once again great write-up Larry.
I’d like you to also address setting up multicam clips for each NLE and how they differentiate in that way (including synced clips); everything form the process to their ease of use in identifying what they are by their icon. These little touches matter a lot. I still prefer the efficiency of multicam editing in FCP, but still don’t like how limited FCP is (natively) in setting up clips for multicam.
You have to be very good with sorting, naming clips or groups of clips, grouping clips, etc. just to make sure you select in the correct order, clips that should be selected to create a multicam clip – at least of audio waveform syncing. Resolve seems much better in its ability to batch sync clips which FCP can’t do (perhaps a memory overhead?). Sync N Link X fills in the gap using timecode as does Tentacle Sync Studio, where you get the batch syncing in just minutes for days of footage beautifully organized and differentiated between synced and multicam clips.
Though that’s why I strongly suggest (if I have the say so) that the production get timecode sync on set. Resolve’s batch syncing is decent, but inconsistent in performance in my experience. I still use it from time to time. Premiere Pro is good as well, but I can’t speak to it as much since I use FCP and DR more for mutlicam work.
Tangier:
You make excellent comments. If the timecode doesn’t match, Premiere, Resolve and FCP are all essentially the same in syncing clips in terms of process and performance – thought I haven’t formally tested their speeds.
If timecode matches, all three are equally fast creating a single multicam clip, but only Resolve supports batch syncing where timecode matches.
You are correct, the ideal is to shoot multicam work with matching timecode. However, in all my projects, I’ve never had that luxury. So, I’ve never had the opportunity to test batch synching.
Thanks,
Larry
I have done several multicam edits in DaVinci and love it…switch it like a live show…then go back and fine tune the cuts. I use a little trick I used in Premiere for keeping the main audio free from getting cut up while switching cams….
Michael:
I agree, live multicam switching is wonderful. The key, as you point out, is to make sure the audio track is complete before adding picture.
Larry
one big problem i found in Resolve is that the wiewer of the multicam cannot be put on a separate display. So when you have 12 cameras, you are restricted to the maximum size of the viewer which is quite small. Do you know a solution to this problem?
[…] interface, making it a favorite among new editors. For those looking for more advanced features, multicam editing in DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro can enhance the editing […]
When I film Multicam productions Live I always record at the camera source that way I can go back and do a Multicam edit to fix any switching problems during the live event to play after and archive. I have been using Multicam editing since FCP 6 .
Excellent idea.
Larry