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Mark: Hey welcome back to MacBreak Studio, I'm Mark, I'm here with Steve, we're talking
Final Cut Pro and we're going into a little bit about auditions, right?
Steve: Right, audition clips have been in Final Cut Pro X since the beginning and what's
unique about them is that you essentially create a container for multiple clips that
you can quickly cycle through.
For example, you want to change out the same shot with different color correction or maybe
try different shots, it's essentially Final Cut Pro's answer to stacking clips in a timeline.
Mark: Instead of stacking them all up, they're all contained in one container and you can
just flip between them.
Steve: It's really a great feature.
I was at Hulu last week and they were just like blown away how cool that was.
They were like, "We're going to use that for music, we're going to use it for all this
great stuff."
Mark: Right, I use it for sound effects a lot, put a whole bunch of different options
into an audition.
We've talked about them before already?
Steve: We've talked about them, but there's one little bugga boo with them that requires
a little bit of a work around, and you'll see, let me just go into it.
So here's this clip of this helicopter.
Those of you who purchased our tutorial are probably familiar with this material, this
is Mitch Kelldorf and his helicopter, the Sabercat.
Now if I play this, actually I'm just going to bring the audio down a little bit.
If I play this, it's basically a lift off clip of him taking off into the ether.
Now what I wanna do is add a couple of versions of this takeoff and because I'm not sure if
I want to use this, maybe I want to use another takeoff shot.
Mark: So you've got multiple shots of him taking off.
Steve: Exactly.
So you can see here Here's another example of him taking off.
So I'm going to go ahead and grab that, it's already pre-selected so I'm just going to
drop it down.
Mark: You've got a range already set on it.
Steve: Yeah I'll just drop it and I'll just choose Replace and Add to Audition.
As soon as I do that you'll notice the timeline.
Mark: Right, because it accommodates the different length, because you can audition clips that
have different durations.
Steve: Yeah and that may or may not be a problem, it's changing the timing of my projects, moving
everything down.
So I wanna talk about how to get around that.
So let me add one more audition clip.
Another one just so you can see we have clips of varying length.
Here's another one, I'll just go ahead and grab that and drop that onto the audition
clip.
This time I'll just say Add to Audition.
Now, of course if you click the badge, you can cycle through them.
Mark: Just tapping the arrow keys.
Steve: Exactly.
Mark: And the length changes each time and everything moves to accommodate it, and nothing
gets put out of sync because of the timeline right?
You've got connected clips that stay in respect to each other.
But sometimes you've got a duration, you know you've got a thirty second spot or something
and you don't want it to change.
Steve: Right, I want this duration, I want to maintain the duration of the original clip
which was this one.
By the way, keyboard shortcuts Control-Option-Left arrow-Right arrow with allow you to cycle
through without having to open up the audition window every time, which gets tiring after
a while.
I find just the keyboard shortcuts faster.
So I have this issue where I don't want to affect the timing but I wanna say use that
clip.
What I'm going to do is select the clip and hit Command-Option-Up arrow
Mark: Lift from primary storyline!
Steve: That is called a lift from primary storyline.
So we could do the same thing, Control-Option-Left arrow-Right arrow, and we certainly can see
it's no longer affecting the clips to the right of it, but it's not really helping me
because if I skim through it, I don't want that length of clip because it's covering
the Mitch interview Mark: It's covering the next clip, so the
whole duration didn't change but you are now cutting into the next clip.
Steve: Right, so here's my workaround.
By the way, this is a thanks to Nathan at Hulu who showed me this, he goes, oh you can
do this and it's great, and again he's already thinking how the magnetic timeline in the
primary storyline works.
All I need to do to resolve this, is take the clip, and hold down the Shift key, and
just drag this clip straight down, the Shift key maintains it's, oops let's do this again.
When I drag it, I don't want it slipping right or left, so I hold down the Shift key and
what it does is it maintains that that clip is actually where it's supposed to be.
Mark: So it doesn't move left or right.
Steve: So what's nice about this, notice I have a longer clip but the gap clip is determining
the duration here, so while the gap clip there is actually peeking down and revealing the
clip that's connected below it.
So the take away here is you can connect video clips below the primary storyline and if they're
below a gap, the gap becomes somewhat of this window now, so I still get my durations.
So I can sit here and I can change the container, the clip inside it, by pressing Command-Option-arrow,
and I can use whatever clip I want it's not going to affect timing and I'm only going
to see that clip for the original duration.
Mark: Right, and if you wanted to see a different portion of that clip you could drag that clip
left to see a different section.
Steve: In fact, it's so funny that you're saying that, you can say, I wanna see this
portion of the clip, so you're only seeing from here to here, and really what you've
just done is you set up a slip edit.
That's really what a slip edit does, except you're putting the content below the gap.
Mark: It's kind of a good illustration of what a slip edit does.
Or if you did wanna see that entire clip in that short window, you could re-time the clip,
and shrink it down to fit in that gap.
Steve: You certainly could re-time it, but I thought this was a really great tip for
being able to work with and audition clip and not affect the timing and still maintain
the original duration of your clip.
Mark: So, you can do whichever you want, you can work with the magnetic timeline such that
it will keep everything in sync but the overall duration won't change, but you can always
find another way to do something.
Steve: There's always another way, exactly.
Mark: Very, very cool.
Great tip, Steve.
So, thank you and if you want to learn more about Final Cut Pro, Motion, DaVinci Resolve,
related applications, pluggins for Final Cut Pro X check us out at: rippletraining.com.
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and we'll see you again on the next MacBreak Studio.