Video Editing : To Page Curl or to Cut?

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Sure, your editing program has 999 transitions--but nowhere in the licensing agreement did you oblige yourself to use each and every one of them.

Every week I have to leave my studio and go to the local grocery store to re-stock my client refrigerator with cold soft drinks. Every week I'd buy the same variety of products. Predictable. Routine. A no-brainer. Then one day I heard about a store--farther away--somewhat harder to reach, but a place exclusively dedicated to soft drinks. They stock a zillion brands that I'd never even heard about. I started sampling their wider range of products. Some of them were, quite frankly, awful. Others were no better than what I'd usually purchased. But some of them were outstanding and my clients seemed to enjoy the new options. Now I find myself splitting my shopping between the two stores, but when I look into my studio fridge today, I'm surprised that while some of the brands or flavors have changed--I really feature about the same overall number of "choices" as I did before I expanded my shopping. Reminds me a little about how I feel about editing transitions.

Early in the days when NLE software was just getting started, the early packages had a pretty limited palate of transition choices. Some tricky dissolves, a handful of wipes, and maybe a few faux 3D flips. Then suddenly, every editing software was packed with a gazillion choices. Spinning, twisting, fracturing, shape-shifting arrays of ways to get from picture A to picture B, including a wipe called "Falling Sh…