What a transition says

Editing software ships with forty transitions and you need two of them. The reason is not taste. Every transition makes a claim about the relationship between two shots, and most of those claims are ones you do not want to make.

The cut is the default and it is not a compromise

A straight cut says the next thing happens next. It is instant, it is invisible when something carries across it, and it is what the overwhelming majority of every film you have ever watched is made of.

Reach for something else only when you can say what it means. If you cannot finish the sentence "I am dissolving here because", cut.

What each one claims

A dissolve says time passed, or that these two things are connected. It is the soft transition and it is the only alternative to a cut that earns its place regularly.

A fade to black is punctuation. It ends a section. Using it between every shot is like ending every sentence with a full stop and a blank page, and it is the most common mistake in a first edit.

A fade from white is a jolt. It reads as a flashback, a memory, or a jump in a commercial. It has one register and it is loud.

A wipe says these are different kinds of thing, from different places. It was a 1930s solution to joining unrelated newsreel footage and it still reads that way. In serious work it mostly says the editor had a toolbar.

Anything spinning, exploding, page peeling or cube rotating says the piece was made by somebody who does not do this often. There are contexts where that is fine. Know which one you are in.

Length

Half a second is the standard dissolve. Fast enough to read as a join rather than an event.

A full second reads as deliberate and slightly dreamy. Two seconds and longer reads as either elegiac or as filler, and the audience will decide which based on whether they are enjoying themselves.

Fades to black at the end of a section usually want a second or more, because they are meant to be felt.

The handle problem

This is the part that catches everybody once.

A dissolve shows both shots at the same time. To do that it needs frames from the outgoing shot after its out point and frames from the incoming shot before its in point. Those extra frames are called handles.

Trim a shot to the exact frame where the action ends and you have no handles. The software then has three choices: refuse, shorten the transition, or shift the clip and change your timing. Different applications do different things and none of them tell you clearly.

So leave a second beyond each in and out point when you cut. It costs nothing, it makes every transition possible, and it means you can adjust a cut later without going back to the source.

Audio transitions follow different rules

Picture wants a cut. Sound usually wants a very short fade, two or three frames, at every single edit, because a hard cut through a waveform leaves a step and a step is an audible click.

That is not a creative decision and it is not a transition in the sense this chapter means. It is hygiene, and some editors do it for you.

Longer audio crossfades, half a second or more, are for joining two pieces of ambience or two sections of music. Used on dialogue they smear consonants and make people sound drunk.

Where transitions genuinely help

• Between two shots of the same place at different times, where a cut would look like a continuity error.
• At the end of a section, to give the audience a breath before the next idea.
• Through a montage where the point is accumulation rather than sequence.
• Over a join in an interview that no amount of B roll covers, where a very short dissolve is less visible than a jump cut.

That last one is worth knowing. A six frame dissolve on a jump cut is close to invisible and reads as a small stutter rather than a mistake. It is the standard documentary fix.