The Best Way to Find the Look for Your Video

Dylan John here, and this is an efficiency hack in Final Cut Pro I know you're going to love. Say you're color grading and you're not sure how you want to grade it, which LUT to use, or whether you want an effect on it. Here's a quick way to set up a nearly side-by-side comparison so you can actually choose the look of your video: auditions.

Start with a base correction

Get your shot to a neutral starting point first with a base correction, then you're ready to stylize. Find Custom LUT in the effects browser and double-click it, open your inspector, and pick a LUT to start with, one of my Filmic LUTs, for example.

Build a carousel of looks

Now press Option Y to audition the clip. That basically duplicates it so you can try different changes and see what works best. Click the little spotlight icon on the clip and you'll see you've made a compact carousel of options. Choose a different LUT for this one, tweak the mix or the grade, maybe add some blur. Press Option Y again to create another option, delete what you don't want, try a different LUT, and maybe scale in a bit to see how it pairs with the surrounding clips.

Cycle through and commit

Here's where the real benefit kicks in. Cycle through your options by pressing Control + Option + Right arrow (or Left). It's an incredible way to see your looks neatly side by side so you can pick the one that works best, way better than trying to remember what a LUT looked like a minute ago. So again: Option Y to audition, and Control + Option + Left or Right to flip through your looks. Once you've committed to one, just copy that clip and paste attributes onto the rest of the scene.