Video Editing: Welcome to Splitsville, Baby!

It's such an elegant little modifier: split. Psychology has the split personality, baseball the split-fingered fastball and the rest of us are left balancing our waistlines against the caloric lure of the sublime banana split.

In video, the term takes on a new meaning when you sit down to craft a video program. Here we enter the realm of the split edit, a technique that, once mastered, can add new levels of interest and audience engagement to your video editing efforts.

A Split What?

A split edit is nothing more than a transition to a clip that brings its audio and video in at different times. The edit point of one is offset relative to the other, so that your audience members either hear something before they see it or see something before they hear it. The power of this simple technique is its ability to present your audience with a change while maintaining your flow and continuity.

Let's imagine we're making a video about fire prevention. It might be for a company that makes fire prevention equipment, for a local fire department or even a local history video about a particular fire that happened to a historic building. We have interviews with some victims of past fires, and plenty of great B-roll shots of everything: from fire trucks racing to a fire scene to individual firemen battling similar structure fires.

One approach would be to slap a title up front and simply start right in on the firefighter footage with some appropriate music or nat sound (ambient audio from the source video). Or we could start with an eyewitness account. Or we could spice it up with split ed…