Pick Camera Angles with Camera Selection
Camera Selection is for multicam edits. It looks at each moment of your timeline, decides which camera should be on screen, and turns off the losing angles for that stretch. You review its plan before anything is applied, and one undo restores everything.
Unlike most AI tools, it doesn't run in the background. Everything happens inside its dialog while it's open. Closing the dialog mid-run is safe and simply abandons the run.
Before you open the dialog
Camera Selection works from data other tools have already produced: Face Tracking tells it who's on screen and looking at the camera, Detect Motion tells it where the content is moving, transcripts tell it who's talking, and Classify results pre-fill the dialog's suggestions. Run Face Tracking and Detect Motion on your camera footage first for the best result.
Missing data doesn't block you. If some footage was never face-tracked, an amber warning appears above the lane list: Some footage in this timeline was never face-tracked — camera choices there will not see look/talk signals. It lists each file with its untracked time, for example interview-cam-b.mp4: 12.3 s untracked, and offers a Process Missing button. Clicking it starts face tracking on just those gaps and shows: Face tracking started on the missing ranges — Run again when it completes to use the new data.
Set up the camera lanes
Open the Process menu and click Camera Selection…. If the timeline has no video tracks, the dialog just says No video tracks on the timeline.
Each video track appears as one lane, in priority order:
- Up and down arrows reorder the lanes. The top lane is your primary angle, the one the tool prefers when angles are otherwise equal.
- A small badge shows the file's classification when it has one, and icons show what data the lane carries: a person icon for Person data (face tracking) and a monitor icon for Content data (motion).
- Scene marks a wide or room shot. The tool treats it as a neutral fallback angle rather than a competing close-up.
- Exclude takes a lane out of the running entirely. An excluded lane never competes and is never touched.
The suggested order and the Scene and Exclude marks are pre-filled from your classification results. Adjust them before running.
Run stays disabled until at least two lanes are not excluded. Hovering it explains: Needs at least 2 non-excluded lanes to choose between.
Choose scope and pacing
The Scope selector decides how much of the timeline the run covers:
- Entire timeline, the default.
- In–Out range, greyed out until both In and Out points are set.
- Selected clips, greyed out until clips are selected.
The Pacing slider runs from Relaxed to Eager. Relaxed holds each shot longer and switches cameras less often. Eager cuts sooner and produces shorter shots.
Run and read the plan
Click Run. When it finishes, a Decision log appears in the dialog: one row per shot, showing the time range, the winning lane, and a plain-English reason. Below it, a per-lane total shows how much footage each lane would lose. If no lane had usable footage, it reads No decisions — no lane had eligible footage.
The log can also list warnings, for example a coverage gap where no lane had eligible footage, or a lane with no face-tracking or motion data that competes as a fallback only.
Changing anything after a run, a lane, the pacing, or the scope, throws the plan away. Run again before you can apply.
Apply the plan
Click Apply. The losing angles' footage is disabled on the video tracks, the dialog closes, and a notification confirms it, for example: Camera Selection applied: 14 shots, disabled footage on 2 lanes (one undo step). If the plan changes nothing, it says Camera Selection: nothing to change instead.
What Apply does and doesn't touch:
- It disables footage, it never deletes or moves clips. Video clips are split so the losing stretch becomes a disabled piece. See Cut and Delete for how disabled clips behave.
- It only touches video tracks. Audio is never changed.
- One press of Ctrl+Z restores everything the apply changed.
Re-running is safe. A new run first re-enables only the clips Camera Selection itself disabled last time, then decides again. Footage disabled by Rough Cut, Umm Removal, or by hand is left alone.
If you edit the timeline while the dialog is open, Camera Selection notices and asks you to refresh, with messages like Camera Selection: the timeline changed since the run — run again. Nothing is applied against a stale timeline.