Welcome back to MacBreak Studio. Mark and Steve here, talking about Final Cut Pro, and
Steve's got some interesting tips going on today with auditions, right? Yes, you know
how actors have to go on auditions, and they have to be chosen by the director or producer.
Well, Final Cut Pro has an audition feature, and I actually use it for auditioning my talent.
For auditioning your actors, they've already been "hired," as it were, but now I use auditions
to go through and figure out, what performance is best. Oh, okay, as an easy way of checking
performances. Let's see how you do it. Ok, so, what I'm gonna do is, I'm going to scene
four, and by the way, this is from a commercial I shot recently for Other World Computing.
We'll put the link below, if you want to check out the commercial. So, what I'm going to
do is, look at some takes, I already have an audition, so I'll delete that there. I
have some takes here of Haley, she's the girl, and she's reacting to the boy, who's pretty
much video taped his down hill slalom course with his GoPros. I have different reaction
shots, of her reacting to watching the video. So I'm just going to skim through these, and
I like this one because he's kind of got this shy thing going. He takes a look at her, and
she's like, "I like that a lot." I'll go into 407, and I'll look, here's yet another take,
and she gives him this look. She looks at him approvingly and nods. And then I have
this other one here where, it's kind of subtle, she just kind of looks up at him, and then
looks back down. You know, a lot can be communicated in look. I like all of them. Okay. And I'm
not sure which one I'll use, the point is there's three different performances, and
I want to encapsulate them into a single audition. That's why I'm calling this auditioning actors.
Okay. So, what I'm going to do is, select these three clips. I'm going to Control Click
on the clips, and choose Create Audition. A lot of people don't know that you can create
an audition right in the browser. Yeah, often they do it in the timeline, by dragging a
clip on top of another one. This is a really cool trick. I'm going to go ahead and create
the audition, and immediately I have the audition clips as signified by the little spotlight
icon, you can see right here. So this is called the pick, that's the one that it chose as
the main take that's being displayed. And somehow, I don't know what it uses to decide
which one is the main one, but it's easy enough to switch to something else. It is, in fact,
you can just click on the icon and use your arrow keys to switch to something else. Be
careful when you do that, because I'm not in my keyword collection, I'm at the level
of the event. I prefer doing the switching in the timeline, but I just wanted to show
you that you jump back to the event when you do that. So anyway, I have this clip here,
and you're right, I don't know what criteria it uses for the pick. And one thing that I
discovered, is that you can do a color grade on an audition clip, where you can't do it
on a regular clip. So if you select a clip and hit Command+6, it says nothing to adjust.
Okay, so with a regular clip, you cannot go to the color board. No, the only way you can
color grade a regular clip, is you have to go into the clip by opening it in its own
timeline, which you cover in your Color Correction tutorial. Right, you can open it in timeline
or drop it into a project, or drop it into a timeline, but you can't color correct it
from the browser. But you can with an audition? Yes! If you select the audition clip- Look,
I have all the controls for color correcting. So you can color correct individual clips
in an audition, but you can color correct when they're in the browser by themselves.
That's pretty funny. It is funny, I can just hear the Apple engineers going, "That's not
a feature, it shouldn't be in there, I don't know what happened." So you can color correct
each one individually. You could. But these are all shot the same, so you'd probably want
to color correct them the same. Yeah, well I'm going to do what, typically in film, what
they call "one light correction." Where you've got contrast, and you get the color balance
adjusted, this looks a little washed out, the color balance isn't exactly right. I've
saved a preset for it, down here in presets, I'll go down here and choose Scene 4 Haley's
house. Ah, ok. Boom, there it is. I've got my little correction. So, what I want to do
is, put this into the timeline. So you just wanted to color correct one- Just one for
now. Okay. So, here's the thing, when I'm cutting a commercial, it's always about a
fixed length, this thing is roughly 35 seconds. And I have a slug here, because I need that
reaction to be a certain amount of time. So in this case, I have a gap clip, so I'll move
the play head to where I want this clip to go. The audition clip is selected, I can just
press Q, and now it puts the audition clip as a connected clip up over the gap clip.
What's nice about this, is I can play this out and see how this performance works.
Okay, that's alright. The other thing you can do is, press Control+Option and the arrow, right
or left arrow. Notice, I'm swapping out the different audition takes. Okay, so without
opening the audition window by clicking on the badge, you're just swapping takes very
quickly. Control + Option + Right/Left Arrow. I find this much faster. Now, notice some
of the takes are very long. This is one of the reasons I connected it, so it wouldn't
effect the other clips downstream. Otherwise you'd be pushing them down. Right. Now, when
I play this... I kind of like that subtle look that she gives. Yeah, and that'll work,
I noticed she got that look done before the play head moved to that last clip. Right.
One of the reasons why I like using connected clips, is that you can take these connected
clips and move them down below the primary storyline. So, where ever you see the gap-
Now you don't have to guess. Let's say I might want her reaction a little bit later, I can
just pick this clip up and move it this way, and it's like I'm creating this window of
that content- You're basically slipping the clip, but you still get to see the whole thing
and take advantage of the different auditions in there, without affecting the timing of
your primary storyline. That's great! By the way, you probably held the Shift key when
you first dragged that down below, to keep if from moving left to right? Yeah, I did
that. So, I find this to be really handy when you have audition clips and you don't want
them to affect the timing, you can just move them below the gap clip, and then shift them
left or right. And now you can really see just the content that's going to show. Right.
Now, because that color grade that I applied in the browser, it only applies it to one
of the clips in the container. I wish it applied it to the container, so whatever you swapped
out would be corrected. That would be cool, but since that isn't the case, I have to go
back to the preset. I'll go ahead and add my little color grade, there. So, there it
is. Alright, fabulous. So there you go. So there's a couple great tips. One is using
auditions directly in the browser, which is awesome. Which most people, I don't know how
much you guys know about that. Color Correcting the clips in the browser, by putting them
in an audition. And then using auditions as connected clips below the timeline. So there's
a couple people going -what!? There's a cornucopia of Final Cut Pro tips. Yeah, those are really
great. I hope you folks find that useful, I know I sure did. I'm definitely going to
use some of these tricks in here. So, you know the normal thing here. Check us out on
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