How to Edit Audition Tapes using Movavi

[Music] hi everyone my name is jordan woods robinson and i am the head honcho at book from tape acting studios and it is critical in this time for all actors to be able to not only tape themselves for auditions in their own self-tape studios but also to be able to edit and to compress and to rename those files in order to be able to send them off for casting and for other folks to be able to look at them and so in this tutorial i'm actually going to go through how to use a software called movavi which is available on both mac and pc i'm on a mac right now but you can download the same software for uh your pc and if you're looking for another video for mac we also have instructions on how to use imovie which is completely free movavi is fairly cheap it's it's about 30 bucks i believe last time i checked so we're going to go through walking through how to use movavi how to edit your files how to compress them at a rate that still keeps high quality and how to send them using the service that's in front of us right here which is called we transfer so here we go i'm going to open up movavi on my computer and this is the first screen that we see we want to click on edit video there now here we are inside movavi what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag my files and i've already got the sample files that i want to use i just click it and drag it and drop it right into place i've got a scene i've got a slate and then i've got a full body shot i'm just going to put all this into place and you see if you just drag them in they just automatically click where they need to go now one thing if you are looking for ways to keep track of your files while you're auditioning this is one thing i like to do after any great take i like to put up a rockstar symbol or a thumbs up or some other marker that way when you're going through and looking at the thumbnails later you don't have to sift through 15 files to say which was the one that i liked we've just got a short little clip of just some fingers up in front of the camera and then you know that the clip right before that is the one that you want to start with and then when you watch it back if you're not as happy with it then you can start to go through and look at some of the other takes so going back into movavi here we go i'm going to click at different points and in order to start to watch the scene i'm just going to click on my spacebar and it starts to play it there's something wrong there we go and that's where the scene starts so i want to make sure that i capture that moment before so somewhere right in here i think there's something wrong somewhere right in there okay i'm going to highlight this file just click and drag over it and then i'm going to hit command b for blade okay and you'll see it just split those clips you can also i'm going to undo that to show you you can also select the file and you can click on the scissors right here it does the exact same thing so you can click the scissors or you can click command b i'm going to click and delete just hitting the delete button on my keyboard and now there's something wrong there we go okay we're at the beginning of the scene now i'm also going to jump to the end of this audio here you can see the waveforms let me jump to the end of that i'm going to hit spacebar again and let it play out until it looks like that moment has ended right about there okay i'm going to highlight the file i'm gonna hit command b i'm going to select the xs file that i don't want hit delete and it's gone okay now i'm gonna do the same thing with the slate usually it's right before you can see she's just about to say hi my name is and so i'm going to go right there i'm going to hit b the command b delete that section let me make sure this is right hi hi my name is there we go perfect okay and then we're also going to jump right to the end good and on a nice smile command b and then we're going to drag through this whole full body slate everything looks good there so we've now just effectively gone through and you can watch everything back just to make sure watch those transitions there we go looks good hi my name is yep there we go and then full body excellent okay no stop it now uh now that we've got everything in place where we want it to go we're going to come down hit this big green export button okay and i'm going to double click this is our file name look over here you can export to several different things 95 of the time the file you want to export is an mp4 however there are specific casting directors that want it to be an mov if that's the case just come select mov and then it'll export as that we're going to export as an mp4 we're going to put actress name underscore character name oh my gosh underscore agency there and then i get to browse and i get to choose where i want this to go i'm just going to save it to my downloads right now but put that wherever your file is now here's the important part here's how to compress this file so that it's not a huge file when you're going to send it off okay you want to click on advanced and then you can ignore all of this stuff it's so great ignore it only come to this one thing right here bitrate vbr stands for variable bitrate if you do that it's going to do everything it can to keep the file size low but then that also leads to pixelation sometimes in the face which is not what we want right we want it to be consistent all the way through so we're going to click custom and then you're going to double click this random number that they put in there and we're going to make that 5 000. okay that's going to make that 5000 kilobytes per second perfect and then you click ok and that's it and look it shows you the file size now when we export this it's going to be 31.9 megabytes now if this was a longer uh audition if it was four minutes or five minutes and that file size was huge closer to like 200 megabytes then you can come back here and double click this make it 4000 or so right and it's going to automatically make it smaller but anything up to a thousand or sorry up to 100 megabytes is fairly common and standard in the industry and you'll be okay it's only once it starts to go over that you can start to mess around with that lastly i'll say never go below about three thousand okay if you go below three thousand you're going to start to notice some differences in the uh in the quality of the tape but 5000 no one be able to tell the difference so good so i know it's 31.9 megabytes i've got it named i know where it's going i'm just going to come click start and now look how quickly it's going okay this will be longer for uh longer files but it goes pretty dang fast movavi is pretty efficient great and then they say hey we've saved it and you said great show me where it is boom there it is and now we're back at we transfer okay and we transfer is completely free this version looks a little bit different than the version you're going to use this is the paid version so we get to show our own images and stuff like that but you don't have to sign up for anything you don't have to pay for anything you come in here and put in the email address that you want to send to usually your agent or the casting director whoever they put in the casting notice you put your email address and then you add your file you can either come through and select it there it is that's what we got or if you already know where it is oh my gosh look at all this stuff if you already know where it is all you have to do is come through and drag that file over and it'll automatically pop up in there right i'm going to get rid of that and then you come down and add one more message um actress name as character name in project most agents prefer for you to put this information on here because they've got so many other emails coming through during the day that they might forget what your specific project is so just include that um there we go everything's all set now we click transfer and the nice thing about wetransfer is on top of it being free it also sends you a confirmation email that it went through and it sends you a confirmation email that the file was downloaded by your recipients and so it's on on top of it being free it's also just very valuable for you to have control so using this whole service we've just gone through we've taken your original file we've cut out the beginning and the ends of the audition the beginning and the ends of the slate made everything consistent uh tied it all together taken full control there and then we've compressed it down to five megabytes per second and allowed it to be a smaller file size we've renamed it and we've sent it off using we transfer and boom there are our emails saying your files were sent successfully to jordanbookfromtape.com and i will also receive an email when those files are downloaded so that's it using uh movavi or imovie if you want to check out that other video but movavi works on mac and pc and so it's an excellent tool whenever possible i recommend not using phone apps in order to edit or try to do this they are limited they are it can just be a little bit more frustrating sometimes whenever you can get those files over to your computer edit it there and send it off from there everything is more consistent and easier if you have any questions please head over to bookfromtape.com you can email me there you can reach out you can ask more questions otherwise i hope this video was helpful in getting you set up to edit and compress and to send those files consistently and easily thanks