Home Video Hints: Watch Your Language!

The guy yelling "Cut!" usually has his own chair, gets to boss people around and generally is able to make other people believe he knows what he's talking about. And this is for a good reason. He does. When was the last time you heard a director shout, "Aannnnd, Page Turn!"?

What is the difference between big-budget national productions and small-market local ads? Besides the quirky charm of local talent, one difference you'll notice is that local ads often feature lots of graphic transitions, usually accompanied by whooooshing sound effects. Want to make more professional-looking videos? This article will help.

A transition is simply a way to end one shot and start the next. The way you do this can lend powerful clues to the viewer about changes in time and location. The most basic, and most widely used are the cut and dissolve. Sounds simple enough. So why are there hundreds of other ways to make a transition? To help answer this question, we must take a brief look back in time.

Shortly after the Jurassic Era, when broadcast equipment manufacturers were competing to sell their latest electronic components to TV stations, a big selling point was how many shapes and movements there were to transition from one video source to another. These switchers cost many thousands of dollars and were quite complicated to use. These dinosaurs set a standard for marketing to techie-types: The more flashy ways to get from A to B, the better.

Spectacular transitions were a standard feature of expensive switchers and other dedicated broadcast hardware. Then desktop video editing systems began flooding the market. To make productions edited on these new lower-cost systems look like they had been created on equipment costing much more, early desktop marketers featured as many whiz-bang transitions as they could cram into a drop-down window. The viewing public has since been pelted with flips, wipes, tumbles, spins and even falling sheep by the unrestrained clicks of over-caffeinated video producers.

So, you've got 326 different transitions at your fingertips. Why use just the cut? The cut is by far the most commonly used transition. It is also the most natural way to edit your scenes together. Our minds recognize it as something we do more than ten thousand times a day: blink. This is important because just as we blink without being conscious of it, a cut does not call attention to itself, which is exactly what we hope to accomplish with good video editing.

Use a cut when you want to imply different perspectives of the same scene. Each shot will relate to the other in the same time and space. You are essentially simulating the use of multiple cameras. This is frequently referred to as "film-style" shooting and editing. By changing the angle of the camera to the subject and then cutting the related scenes together, it appears as if you used several cameras to capture a single action, dramatically increasing viewer interest.

You can also use the power of the cut to connect subjects in different places and times as if they were in the same place and time. Let's say we have a wide shot of a man walking on a lonely dirt road. We cut to a close-up of his face as he looks over his shoulder as if he heard something rustle in the bushes. We can then cut to rustling bushes in our back yard. Cut back to the man as his pace quickens. Cut the now rustling bushes as they part and reveal the sinister eyes of your pet pooch. Cut to the man running - well, you get the picture. Exchange the dog with a hungry lion and you have a good example why you would want to only connect the actor with the lion with a series of cuts.