In the Levis commercial they have the entire scene blocked out completely with the camera movement and actor movements. If you'll notice the switch is usually made on a close up, or a shot where the actor switching is partially obscured. That way they can use a new actor with the old one's clothes as their outer layer. The Ray Ban commercial is not actually match cutting. It's just sequential shots always with the camera tracking backwards at roughly the same speed. Each shot starts at an extreme close up on somebody's glasses. Then in post the previous shot is matted in. Since the camera is moving at about the same speed the entire time the whole thing flows together. The iPod commercial is tightly scripted and planned out. Each actor knows the movement the actor before them made and the imitate it, as well as the movement the next actor is going to make. They line the actor up in the exact same space, (probably aided by tracing an outline on the monitor) Then they do some traveling mattes in post as the transitions. Here's another video with lots of good match cuts. http://www.waverlyfilms.com/switchfoot.html In this case it's again a lot of planning. And probably also some transparent overlay tracings of the previous shot on the video monitors. The cuts with more movement are easier to match.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akZsyVfRuMI There's a youtube link to the video I posted previously. To do traveling mattes you need a program like Adobe After Effects or Apple's Motion. Both will work on Mac and I prefer Motion's interface. Then it's just a matter of drawing the mattes and setting keyframes for movement. Final Cut can do a very limited traveling matte, if it's based on simple shapes like square, rectangle, and maybe circle. Probably not worth the trouble though, get a program made for it. As for the blonde to brunette change: If you look in the mirror you can see the blond wig leaving the girl's head along with the sweater. Not actually cut, and no work in post. In camera effects are the greatest. More match cuts: There's a couple in this classic scene from the graduate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtSOaJzJrhI They kick in at about the 1:33 mark. They're slow reveals and take time for the audience to realize that they happened. Michel Gondry directed this Chemical Brothers video that's built entirely out of match cuts. And they're very much in your face. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJyHEhdszDg

How did they do the cut from the office guy to the pole guy? This is going to be wordy. At it's basic form this cut should be much simpler than it appears to have ended up being. This is essentially a wipe transition. Watch the cut frame by frame. At first I was going to say it was a straight up wipe, but it looks like they had to throw in a couple traveling mattes and use some creative cutting to make it work in time with the music. 1. The action in both scenes follows the same movement and goes roughly the same speed. The framing and positioning of the actors is very close. 2. A foreground object is used as either an entrance or exit, to help with the wipe transition. In this case, a guy with a dark shirt and a tie. 3. They foreground guy has been matted in on a separate layer. Probably because they didn't get the timing perfect in camera. If you check the frames individually you can see the tie and shoulder of the original office guy repeated in the blurred edge of the traveling matte on the right side of foreground guy. What probably happened here is that the foreground guy showed up in frame a second or half second too late, so they matted him out and just moved him into the shot a bit sooner. 4. The foreground guy is matted on the left also. It travels with him as he leaves the frame and reveals the next shot. The camera and actor are moving at roughly the same speed and it works. You can't exactly do this in Final Cut Pro. You could do it if it didn't require the complicated edge of the foreground guy. You CAN do the next cut in the video in Final Cut Pro. Because the next cut is a basic wipe transition with a straight edge. Final Cut likes straight edges. The cut is the guy sliding down the rail, he slides past a foreground element, which in this case is a straight column. The wipe transition is set to move from left to right at the same speed as the foreground column. It reveals the next clip with the camera moving roughly the same speed and the actor in a similar position. This wouldn't be too hard to set up and shoot yourself either. You probably ought to do a match cut test. It'll help the whole process make much more sense to you. All you need is a tree or a post. And a friend to walk in front of the camera. Shoot him moving at the same walking speed and walk the camera along with him. Position the camera so that the post or tree comes between you and blocks out the entire frame. Then shoot a bit of him walking anywhere else at the same speed. In Final Cut, lay the two tracks down and throw a wipe transition between them. Mess with the speed settings a bit and you should have it. A little Edge Feather will help also. An even easier match cut to do is the Slap Pan. A really good example of this working can be found in Boogie Nights (where Mark Wahlberg keeps catching those bags of coke and getting more and more irritable). I've also noticed them being used a lot in the show 30 Rock. You basically slap the camera left or right as fast as you can at the end of your first shot. Then shoot your second shot normally. In editing just cut in the middle of the slap and it will look pretty cool. I don't answer warez/crackz questions. I can't help you get around your install disk problems. I will help you with questions about running and using the program itself though.

If you go to www.waverlyfilms.com and find the video on the creator's site it will be presented in Quicktime. Quicktime will let you go frame by frame using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Edge Feather is a feature that a lot of elements of Final Cut Pro have. It creates a blur around the edge of the frame to help with blending. Not all transitions have it, but I'm pretty sure the wipes do. "Do you have to use a matte or a foreground object to do a match cut?" No. There are certain cases where it's necessary to matte to get the effect the director wants. And a foreground object wipe can help make a match cut smoother, but all you really need to match cut are similar compositions with similar elements. Ok... "What's a matte?" Think of it like a stencil. It's a way to superimpose one video track on top of another or a way to cut a hole in the top video track and expose the one underneath. (Same thing, different wording.) When most people watch movies and they see something superimposed they automatically think "Greenscreen." Greenscreen does get used a lot, but there are a whole lot of cases where a simple animated Matte will be quicker and cheaper. Greenscreen is actually just another type of Matte (a more complex one) Let's say that I wanted to have a basketball spinning in mid air in a scene. Yes, I could set up a greenscreen and shoot a basketball spinning in front of it, and then key out the green. That's a lot of work. Since a basketball maintains a circular shape even when it's constantly spinning, it's a better choice to just create a circular matte. So I apply a circle matte to the basketball footage that's the same size as the basketball. I line the matte and the ball up perfectly. Just like the stencil. If the basketball moves around on the screen, I move the stencil around with it. Since the ball is still a circle, the matte's shape doesn't need to change. The Matte allows whatever video track is beneath it to show through. If there is no video track, then it just show black. So if I put some footage underneath my matted track, then it looks like there's a basketball just floating in my footage. This is really basic. But you can expand this concept. So to apply it to the Switchfoot video. There's a shot with a foreground guy who moves quickly past the camera. They created a matte (stencil) the shape of this guy. He moves from left to right, they make the matte move the same way at the same speed. Then they put it on top of the intersection of two other video clips. The two intersecting clips also have a wipe transition applied to them that moves from left to right. The transition just happens to be moving at the same speed the foreground guy matte clip is moving. The foreground guy hides the "wipe line" Look at the Star Wars movies for examples of glaring wipe transitions. Match cuts DO NOT have to have any of this crap to work. Look at the very beginning of the Switchfoot video with the tapping feet. All that's happening there is they put people's feet in the same place in the composition and used basic cuts to get to the next one. Which leads into using drawings on the monitor to help in composing match cuts. Get some transparency sheets, a black marker, some tape and a small TV. Plug the TV in to use as a live monitor while you're shooting (or you could do this on the pull out screen of a camcorder, it would just be smaller). Tape a transparency sheet to the monitor, it should cover the whole screen. Put your actor or object into the shot. Use the marker to trace their outline. Also draw a rectangle to show the edges and corners of your screen as reference marks, in case you can't leave the transparency on the monitor indefinitely. That way you can put it back on in the right place. Now shoot your first shot. When it's time to shoot your second shot of your match cut, use the outline on the monitor to make sure you get your actor or object in the correct place. Shoot your second shot. Cut the two clips together... Tadaa, match cut.