Something else you can do with Auditions?

Yes, although we have talked about Auditions in Final Cut Pro X before, this week on MacBreak Studio, Steve Martin from Ripple Training demonstrates another way to work with this powerful feature.

For the uninitiated, auditions allow you to put multiple clips inside a container and easily switch among them. They make it quick and easy to look at alternate takes of a shot, different color corrections on a shot, different shots of the same subject, different sound effects – basically anytime you'd like to look at twor or more alternatives in your project, auditions are the way to go. By comparison, stacking clips up in tracks and turning them on and off looks positively primitive.

And because of Final Cut Pro X's magnetic timeline, the clips in an audition can have varying durations, and the timeline will automatically adjust for them, rippling all clips to the right to accommodate as needed.

This is a great feature of the magnetic timeline, so it's a bit ironic that we focus in this episode on how to get around it! But there can be times when you don't want the duration of your overall project to change when you swap out a clip. So Steve has an answer for us, as he usually does.

The “workaround”, if you can call it that, involves turning the audition clip into a connected clip – but in a way that you may not expect. It demonstrates how Final Cut Pro lets you manipulate the timeline in ways that are flexible and often surprising. Check out the video to see how he does it.