How to Edit Audition Tapes using iMovie

[Music] hey everyone my name is jordan woods robinson from book from tape acting studios and it is critical in any actor's profession right now that we learn how to not only film our own self-tape audition videos but also that we learn how to edit and compress and rename those files in order to be able to send them off to casting directors in this video i want to introduce to you how to use imovie in order to edit your video and to compress it and to rename it and to send it off including the service that you're looking at right now called we transfer and if you're not a mac owner i also have another video in which i walk you through using an app called movavi which is very cheap and very easy to learn how to use and both of them will give you excellent uh capabilities of being able to edit your files consistently so here we go we're going to open up imovie and here we are with an imovie i'm going to open up and i've got my sample files that i'm going to use for this walkthrough so we've got a scene and then i've got a slate and then i've got a full body shot at the end so i'm just going to drag these into place and they automatically pop into my grid which is great by the way if you are looking for ways to keep track of your files as you're editing or as you're recording them i've got this system where after any take i think is a great one i just record a rock symbol or a thumbs up or anything in right after that take that way when you're looking at these in thumbnails later you can say oh that's right i wanted to look at the last rock star and now you don't have to go through looking at 15 files you can just look at that one and then if that's not the one that you wanted then you can start over or then you can keep looking at others so i've got all my files here i'm going to click and i'm going to hit the space bar in order to start watching from that spot there's something wrong with mom and dad there i don't know if you can hear that audio or not i i can but i'm going to find this moment before where she starts where is it that that beat starts somewhere right in there that moment before and we can actually there we go somewhere right in there okay so i'm going to hit on my keyboard i'm going to hold command i'm going to hit b and that does blade you can also go up to modify and select split clip in order to do the same thing so i'll show you you can come up here hit split clip and do the same thing but the shortcut is to hold command and hit b so i'm just getting rid of this extra information before the scene is actually started there's something wrong with that there we go excellent and now i'm going to come to the end i'm going to i'm um scanning over to uh where the end of her vocal or the the sound is and i'm going to hit spacebar again and wait until right there that's where that thought just ended great i'm going to delete that and now we're moving into the slate there we go we can jump right before the audio hit command b 6 11. there we go and excellent great and then we can go back and watch it all together if we want to make sure that everything lines up excellent great excellent now we're done we've just put everything together we've just taken out the beginning moments that weren't clean and uh and the end moments where we get to control how that beat ends we've taken out any extra talking and now we're going to go up to export and we're going to export it as a file and i'm just going to create a we're going to do actress name underscore character name underscore agency right something fairly standard like that now this is where you get to control your compression settings okay you want it to be in 1080p you want to be as high quality as possible it'll it'll ask you sometimes the quality and sometimes it'll be on automatic setting but you can see over here where if i compress this right now it would be 850 megabytes which is huge that's almost a gig it's going to take you hours to send it and any casting director usually wants it between 50 and 100 megabytes so we're going to do that for them i'm going to go to custom quality and then you get the slider here and generally you want to slide that down until you're at around 5 megabytes per second 5 mbps and look that has just made it 31 megabytes okay if this were a longer audition and this number was closer to 150 or 200 then yeah you could probably slide it down even further you could go down to i would say don't go any lower oh look they don't even let you don't go any lower than three megabytes and then you're gonna because then you're gonna start to notice quality difference but if you're at about five megabytes the naked eye is not going to be able to tell the difference between a um this compressed video and the original file it's going to be pretty dang good and it's only 30 megabytes large which is perfect so let me click next and you save that wherever you need to save it i'm just going to put it into my downloads right now but um if i were doing other people's files i have dedicated files for them and then we can see up here in this little circle once that gets all the way around then that video is finished the nice thing about imovie is that if you had another audition to do after this you can select all of these even while that's exporting you can select all of these and delete them and get started on editing your next video you don't have to wait for that to be done okay so that is the most basic version of imovie that you need to know you can drag your files in you can hit command b in order to split the clip and to delete the excess and then once you go into uh sending your file you want to make sure to send it at about five megabytes per second now and here we are in we transfer this looks a little bit different uh than how it will look on your end this is our paid version of wetransfer that has our own pictures and stuff up um it'll look a little bit different for you but you don't have to sign up for anything you will put in the email i want to send it to jordan bookfromtape.com you put in the casting director or your agency's email you put in your email address now i click add file i come through and i click there's my file that i just saved click open and it's added it right there you get to see it then put a little message actress name as character name in project thank you right and then click transfer and you get to watch it count down as it goes all the way up from 1 to 100. now the great thing about wetransfer is that you will get a confirmation email when the person has downloaded it so it's completely free for you and you get all these great controls of being able to send a file directly from your computer and being able to send it to whoever you want and as soon as they download it you get a confirmation email and look my email just came through book from tape sent you files so this is the most basic version of being able to take your audition file drag it into imovie edit it in order to be the exact version that you want to put all those files together to be able to rename it and compress it and to be able to send it off to using we transfer we transfer as an industry standard many many many casting directors prefer this over any other method and it's amazingly powerful you for you to be in control as well knowing when your files were downloaded so that's it if you have any questions please reach out um you can find me at bookfromtape.com or uh and you can email me through there and you can ask us any other questions um but otherwise i hope this video gets you started on your on your journey thanks