Documentary and interview workflow: multicam, B-roll and export

A multi-camera interview or documentary shoot — two or more angles, a separate sound recorder, B-roll to cut away to, and a finished timeline handed to your NLE — touches several parts of Eddie at once. This walks the whole pipeline in order, start to finish, with the decisions that trip people up called out explicitly.

1. Import your footage

You don't have to choose between a pre-built multicam clip and individual camera files — both work, and Eddie handles them differently on purpose.

• Already built a multicam clip in Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro? Bring that in as-is. From an FCPXML, Eddie recognizes the multicam clip, unpacks it into its underlying camera angles, and trusts the sync your NLE already established — it reads the alignment your editor recorded rather than re-deriving it from the audio. From Premiere, selecting a multicam clip in your bin is recognized the same way: Eddie brings it in as one switchable multicam group, not separate unsynced files.
• Only have the individual camera files? Import those directly — the raw files from each camera, plus your separate sound recorder's audio if you used one. Eddie groups and syncs them itself; see step 2.

Either path lands you in the same place: one multicam group with switchable angles. If you already have a synced multicam clip from your NLE, importing it directly is the shorter route — Eddie doesn't need to re-sync what your editor already got right.

2. Sync and group the cameras

If you imported individual camera files rather than a pre-built multicam clip, Eddie groups footage covering the same take automatically when the cameras arrive in the same import. When that doesn't happen — a card turns up late, or auto-detection misses a pairing — you don't rebuild anything:

• A camera added later: import it with Add media, then tell Eddie which take it belongs to — "camC is another angle of the same take as camA and camB, sync it in."
• A whole project to sweep: "Sync all my cameras" checks every ungrouped source against every existing group in one pass and proposes a grouping to review before anything is applied.

Eddie aligns angles by audio by default — matching the same words or moment across files — and falls back to embedded timecode (including LTC, if your rig records it as an audio signal) when cameras were genuinely jam-synced to a shared clock. A clip with no usable audio and no matching timecode needs the offset given explicitly. Full detail: Multicam: sync cameras across imports and Multicam: the complete guide.

3. Set your master audio

Multicam sound defaults to the reference angle Eddie synced against, but you can pin it explicitly: in the media list, hover the camera angle with your best audio (typically the separate sound recorder, not a camera's scratch mic) and use the ⋮ menu → Set as active audio. This re-points the sound of every cut in that group at once — preview, MP4 render, and every NLE export — and it's a single click with an undo. See Multicam: the complete guide for the full mechanics, including setting a default video angle the same way.

4. Add B-roll

Eddie logs B-roll visually as part of import — a description of what's on screen, its shot type, and the themes it touches — whether or not the clip has usable audio of its own. A silent wide shot still gets analyzed and understood; it isn't limited to matching spoken words. That log is what Eddie draws on when placing B-roll, so you don't have to manually describe every clip for it to find a home.

That said, the more specific your prompt, the tighter the placement:

"Add B-roll to my rough cut. Use footage that matches what the speakers are talking about, stay on the person for intros and the most emotional moments, and skip anything that doesn't really fit."

Eddie reaches for your own imported footage first, then stock, then generated clips if neither has the shot. See Add b-roll and overlays for the full placement logic, and Subclips and picking the best parts of a clip for how that visual log gets built.

5. Prompt the cut

Left alone, Eddie edits multicam like a live director — stays on whoever's talking, holds the wide for quick exchanges, doesn't cut on every filler word. Direct it further with plain language: "Cut to whoever's talking, and hold the wide shot for the back-and-forth." See What you can ask Eddie to do for the full range of directable behavior.

6. Export to your NLE

Multicam carries through as real multicam, not a flattened track — Final Cut Pro gets a native multicam structure, Premiere gets the angles stacked with alternates muted below the chosen one.

What the export file points at depends on how the footage came in:

• Imported through the desktop app — the export references your original camera files at their real location, so your NLE reconnects to them directly.
• Uploaded on the web, or pulled from cloud storage — the export references Eddie's transcoded proxy media instead. If you relink to your originals here, Final Cut in particular will often reject them or show them offline, because proxies don't exactly match your source frame rate, resolution or duration. Relink to the proxies, not the originals, and it connects cleanly.

Full detail: Export to Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve, Avid & OTIO and, if Final Cut specifically shows files missing after import, Final Cut shows missing files after importing an Eddie export.