How to Edit Two Camera Footage in Premiere Pro

Learn how to edit two camera footage in Adobe Premiere Pro so you can create dynamic, engaging recipe videos. Watch the video below or keep reading to learn how.

Shooting recipe videos using two cameras can make your footage so much more dynamic. It’s great for both hosted style cooking shows and the overhead hands and pans videos. 

This also creates a lot of footage to work with when it comes to editing.

Today I’m going to show you my favorite way to get this done quickly, easily, and beautifully.

How to edit two camera footage for recipe videos

Lay down Camera A clips

I’m working here on a recipe video for enchiladas, and I’ve already gone through and laid down all of my Camera A footage.

If I was only shooting with one camera, this is the video that I would edit down to be probably one minute long, but I’ve just gone through and laid down clips for all the steps of the recipe.

Color code footage

Over on the left in the Project Panel, you can see I’ve color coded my bins for Camera A and Camera B. I’ve also color coded the footage inside the bins to match.

If you’re not familiar with bins or how to color code them, be sure to go back to my post on how to use bins in Premiere Pro to learn how to do that.

Match up clips

There might be some Camera B footage that I would use towards the beginning of this recipe, but for the best example I’m going to jump ahead to where we’re adding things to a bowl.

You can see the first thing I’m adding is beans, so I’m going to find the right Camera B clip and scrub through to find where the beans are added, using the right and left arrows on the keyboard to move by one frame until I get right to where I want to be.

I like to jump to the Camera B footage as ingredients are getting dumped in the bowl. You’ll want to look for reference points to line up the footage.

In this example, I’m going to add the second angle just before the beans start tumbling out of the bowl.

I’m marking an in and out using “I” and “O” on the keyboard. You can go back to my post on how to use quick keys to edit recipe videos for more information on how to use quick keys.

I’m going to grab the little film strip in the Source Monitor and drag the clip down into V2 in the timeline. You can see the clips from the two cameras are different colors in the timeline because we’ve color coded the bins.

Later on when I’m stirring I’m going to look for indicators of where things are matching up. If I start at the beginning of the stir, I can count how many times the utensil moves back and forth to find a matching point.

I’m looking at how the spatula is on the left side of the bowl and trying to match it’s position and movement.

Watch the clips to check

Watch through this section in your timeline to make sure your footage matches up. However, now you can see it overlaps the next clip. Press “A” on the keyboard to enable the Track Select Forward tool and move all the clips past that to the right.

Should I put Camera B on V1 or V2?

It’s up to you if you want to leave the Camera B footage on V2 or not. I kind of like to keep it all streamlined on V1 when doing recipe videos because they’re pretty simple.

Here you can see the reason it’s helpful to have your footage color coded. Once I’m done editing I would go in and rotate the Camera A footage so my hands are coming from the bottom of the screen.

If you have Camera A on V1 and Camera B on V2, it’s easy to know which you need to rotate and which you don’t. If you’re keeping them all on V1, having two different colors is another way to differentiate the footage to quickly apply rotation, color correction, or any kind of bulk effect onto just the footage you want.

I really hope you’ll start shooting your recipe videos with two cameras if you aren’t already, it doesn’t add too much time to your editing workflow and can help retain viewers by being more visually interesting.

Let me know if you have any questions, or head over to the Facebook Group to start a conversation there.