Final Cut Pro X Babbling

When it comes to color grading, I pretty much have no clue what I’m doing. I bumble around though, and I stumbled on a neat trick. Forgive me if everyone knows about it… When visually comparing two shots, it’s easy if one shot can be loaded in the source monitor so you can check the two side by side. But when the 2 shots are in a timeline, I’ve always been annoyed by needing to click back and forth between them to see whether they match well. I’m probably doing it wrong, but here’s the little trick, courtesy of our friend the skimmer. 🙂

Select the clip you want to work on and place the playhead on it so it shows in the monitor and scopes. Then, turn on the skimmer and hover over the “source” clip. You now see your “source” in the monitor and scopes. Then, just hit the S key to turn it on and off, making adjustments to your selected clip. It’s a super fast way to ‘A/B’ shots from the same timeline. See the gigantic gif below for a “demo”. Excuse the blur… top secret stuff! lol

Helpful? Common knowledge? Let me know! 🙂