Video edits explained

When you watch a movie or a TV news story, are you aware of the editing? If the answer is no, you’re probably watching a good example of how to do it well. But if the result is so seamless that you don’t notice the individual edit points, it’s hard to pick up the tricks of the trade.

This video from RocketJump Film School uses movie clips to illustrate different types of edits and explains how they’re done. Some of these techniques should really only be used by experts. For TV news, you want to avoid jump cuts at all costs and use transitions like dissolves only rarely. But other types of edits, like J-cuts and L-cuts, work really well in news video. So have a look. (Fair warning, though: some of the movie examples are a little gory.)

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