This week on MacBreak Studio, Steve Martin from Ripple Training shows us a great tip for using auditions in Final Cut Pro X.

If you think you already know all there is to know about auditions, watch this episode anyway, because he sprinkles in several very useful tips about other subjects, and uses auditions in a way you may not have considered.

His goal is to evaluate multiple takes of a performance by two actors. His strategy is to create an audition containing each of these takes. But instead of making the audition in the Timeline, he creates it directly in the Browser before adding any of the clips to the timeline by selecting them all, right-clicking, and choosing the Audition command from the contextual menu. This method is much faster than first editing in a single clip, then dragging each additional clip on top of it.

But before he edits this audition into the timeline, he does something shocking: he color corrects one of the audition picks right in the Browser. Why is this so shocking? Because you can’t color correct ordinary clips in the Browser! 

From there he takes use through the normal audition process of switching and evaluating different picks in the context of the edit. But even here he does something very clever. Because each perfomance has a different duration, placing the audition clip in the timeline would change the overall project timing – and in this case he want to force each pick to the same duration so that his project duration doesn’t change. While you could do this by connecting the audition above a gap clip set to the correct duration, it’s tricky to tell when the clip needs to stop. So, Steve shows us how you can connect a video clip below the primary storyline, allowing you to see just the portion of each performance that will fit in the allotted time.

All together, a must-watch episode for you Final Cut Pro X editors.