Any time you shoot with more than one camera at once — an interview with two angles, a podcast with a wide and close shots, a live performance — multicam editing lets you cut between them without manually aligning footage clip by clip.
Why Multicam Instead of Manual Cutting
You could place each camera's footage on its own track and manually cut between them, but multicam mode gives you two big advantages:
- Synchronization is handled once, at the start, instead of repeatedly eyeballing alignment
- You can switch angles in real time while watching playback, which is dramatically faster than scrubbing and trimming manually for every angle change
Syncing Your Angles
Select all the clips from every camera (and a separate audio recording, if you have one) in the Project panel, right-click, and choose "Create Multicam Source Sequence." Premiere offers a few sync methods:
- Audio — the most reliable method when every camera captured its own audio (even a scratch track from an on-camera mic). Premiere aligns clips by matching audio waveforms.
- Timecode — reliable if your cameras were jam-synced or share timecode, common in professional multi-camera shoots
- In/Out points or clip markers — manual fallback if neither of the above is available; clap once at the start of each take and place a marker on the clap frame in each clip
Audio sync is the most forgiving for solo creators and small teams — it doesn't require any special hardware setup on set, just make sure every camera is recording audio, even a rough guide track.
Editing in Multicam Mode
With your synced multicam source sequence, drag it onto a new sequence's timeline, then enable multicam view: click the wrench icon on the Program Monitor and turn on "Multi-Camera." This splits the Program Monitor into a grid showing every angle simultaneously, with your active output shown larger.
While the sequence plays, click the angle you want in the grid — Premiere cuts to it in real time, on the beat of your playback. This is far faster than manual editing for content with natural back-and-forth (an interview, a panel discussion) because you can react to the conversation the same way a live TV switcher would.
Cleaning Up After the Fact
Real-time switching is fast but imprecise — you'll often be a frame or two off, or want to change a decision after reviewing it. After your first switching pass:
- Scrub through and nudge cut points that land awkwardly (mid-word, mid-blink)
- Right-click any cut in the multicam sequence to manually reassign which angle plays there, without needing to switch live again
- Trim the edges of each angle-cut the same way you'd trim any other clip
When to Cut Angles
Cutting on every pause or camera movement gets exhausting to watch fast. General guidance for interview and conversation content:
- Cut to the person speaking, by default
- Cut to a reaction shot (the listener) at a meaningful moment — a laugh, a nod, a visible reaction — not randomly
- Hold a wide shot briefly at the start of a new topic to reset the viewer's sense of geography, then move to closer angles
Flattening the Sequence
Once your multicam edit is finished, you can leave it as-is (it still exports correctly), or right-click and "Flatten" to convert it into a single standard sequence. Flattening simplifies the project if you need to hand it off, but you lose the ability to switch angles after the fact — keep an unflattened backup if you might want to revise later.