Video Tutorial: How to Audition Clips in Final Cut Pro X
Audition your clips to quickly try out multiple shot scenarios!
Final Cut Pro X’s new Audition feature allows you to easily try out multiple clips while you’re deciding on how you’d like to execute the edit. It’s a great way to see how different shots look in the context of your storyline, without needing to physically go through the process of editing each shot into the sequence.
This Final Cut Pro X video tutorial will teach you how to:
- Add multiple clips to an Audition
- Switch from one clip to another within an Audition
- Duplicate clips and apply effects within an Audition
- Finalize an Audition
Ashley: Hello. This is Ashley Kennedy with PremiumBeat.com, here to show you how to audition clips in Final Cut Pro X. Auditioning is a way for you to try multiple clips in your sequence, without committing to one until you’ve seen how everything works. OK. I have a sequence here, and I’m not quite sure about the second shot. I’m going to go ahead and play through it here. All right. This shot here of her walking by this fountain, I’d like to try a couple of more shots in there, but I don’t necessarily want to edit it in, take it out, edit another shot in, take it out. Let’s go ahead and audition. This is that shot. There’s a couple more that are similar.
Here’s a close-up, and an even closer shot here. Let’s try these out instead. What I’m going to do is mark an in and an out point. I actually
already have an in and an out point here. I’m going to just drag this onto the clip. This looks like a replace edit, but if I let go, instead of
choosing “replace,” I’m going to choose “add to audition.” Now, nothing really happens in the time-line visually, except I see this little icon here, the audition icon. That’s going to come into play in just a moment. For now I’m going to add just a couple of more clips to my audition. Let’s go ahead and grab an in and an out point here, where we have a closer shot. All right. I’m just going to drag this again on top, and add it to my audition.
Maybe we’ll just get something completely different here, just to see if we like this. Again, an in and an out point, and we’ll add that to the
audition as well. OK. We’re going to go ahead and open the audition now. I do that by clicking on my little audition icon. You can see that we have all of our clips loaded up here. Now, take a look. We have the name of the clip, and also the duration. I can either click on each one of these physically, or I can just use my left and right arrow keys to go back and forth between these shots. Now, notice that if I’m in my primary story line, which I am, the length of the clip will lengthen and shorten as I add each one of these, which happen to be different durations. OK? So I’m just sort of going through, and if I want to try something out, I can hit “done.” We’ll go ahead and play this. My audio is just a little loud, so we’ll bring that down. We haven’t committed to it yet. If we want to come back and audition something else, we certainly can. We’ll do the medium shot here. All right. This is just a way to really quickly kind of see what we like, in this area of the time-line.
If I again open my audition, you’ll see another button here, called “duplicate.” This is a really good way to duplicate a clip that you might
want to put an effect or color correction filter on. So, if I wanted to come back to this shot here, and we’ll go ahead and duplicate this. If we
wanted to open up the effect browser, and we can go ahead and just choose an effect and drag it right on. Now this is one of our audition clips. If I wanted to choose this one, I could hit “done.” Now we have our bleach bypass version of this clip in our time-line If we have a lot of effects or a lot of color correction needs for our sequence, this can be really useful. Do I want to color correct it this way or that way? It’s up to you. Now, once you’ve gone through and decided exactly what you want for our shot, I’m going to go back in and actually choose something. Let’s go to our close-up here, and “done.” Again, you can come in and you can ripple, you can roll, you can slip, you can slide. You can do anything that you want once it’s in here, but if I want to commit to this and say, this is the clip that I want, all I have to do is right-click on the click. Go to “audition”, and then “finalize audition.”
You’ll notice that my little audition icon here has disappeared. I now no longer have those other clips available to me to audition. I’ve said this is the one, I’m ready to go. I think I like my decision. OK. Just a quick tip on showing you how to audition clips here. Make sure to check back often on PremiumBeat.com, to see more exciting tutorials in both Avid and Final Cut Pro. This is Ashley Kennedy with PremiumBeat.com.
