How to cut out every crowd shot in a multicam recording
Tell Vizard Agent the rule is absolute and includes spectators in the background. A multicam edit cuts to the crowd constantly, and the shots that survive a quick pass are the wide ones where the audience is small but present, and the tail of each section where the camera drifts off the stage.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Give Vizard Agent the exclusion at its strictest, including distant spectators, and say what the act is. The exclusion drops shots outright. The subject decides which of the rest are usable: for a magic act the hands are the content, so a shot that crops a hand fails however good it looks. The brief below lacked that part, and it cost several rounds to establish.
Make three vertical clips of the performance. Exclude all audience reaction shots, crowd shots, applause and cutaways to spectators. Start and end on complete moments.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It escalates from sampling to a manual map. A contact sheet finds the obvious stage sections quickly, but the wide shots contain the audience too, and so do the last seconds of most sections. Only a second-by-second map of the stage-only intervals catches those. In the session behind this article it:
- Built an overview of the staging, pulled frames from the stage sections only, and checked the final block second by second to exclude even distant spectators.
- Resolved a disputed wide angle in the finale by stepping through it frame by frame.
- Swept the whole source second by second to map the stage-only intervals by hand, reviewing it in four parts, and removed two tails where a reaction shot had survived.
- Found burnt-in text and interface elements in the source, and rebuilt clean versions without them.
- Rebuilt the clips on continuous source music after the audio jumped at the visual joins.
- Dropped every close-up and borderline shot where the performer's hands left frame, until all three clips held both hands.
When does this not work well?
When the stage and the audience share a frame throughout. A recording shot from the back of the room has the crowd in every wide shot, and the only stage-only material is whatever close work exists. A tight rule plus a tight subject constraint can also leave nothing, and then the honest answer is which rule to relax.
Common questions
Why does a coarse pass miss shots? Because the audience appears in wide shots and at the tails. Vizard Agent sweeps finely for that reason.
Why did the audio jump? Because each visual join cut the music. Vizard Agent rebuilds on a continuous track.
What if a close-up crops the subject? Say what must stay in frame and Vizard Agent drops those shots.