Getting to Know Digital Video Transitions

One of the trickiest aspects of movie editing is making clean transitions between clips. Often, the best transition is a simple, straight cut from one clip to the next. Other times, you want to fade gently from one scene to the next. Or, you may want a more fancy transition — say, one that makes it look like the outgoing scene rolls apart like drapes to reveal the incoming scene behind it.

You generally can divide most transitions into a few basic categories, as follows:

• Straight cut: This category is actually no transition at all. One clips ends and the next begins. Poof! — just like that.

• Fade: The outgoing clip fades out as the incoming clip fades in. Fades are also sometimes called dissolves.

• Wipe: The incoming clip wipes over the outgoing clip by using one of many possible patterns. Alternatively, the outgoing clip may wipe away to reveal the incoming clip.

• Push: The incoming clip pushes the outgoing clip off the screen.

• 3-D: Some advanced editing programs provide transitions that seem to work three-dimensionally. For example, the outgoing clip may wrap itself up into a 3-D ball, which then spins and rolls off the screen. Pinnacle's Hollywood FX plug-ins for Studio provide many interesting 3-D transitions.

Whatever style of transition you want to use, modern video-editing programs like Apple iMovie and Pinnacle Studio make the process easy. But before you can use transitions, you need a project that already has several clips on its timeline.

Thankfully, most modern video-editing programs — including Windows Movie Maker 2 — provide you with a pretty generous assortment of transitions. These programs usually organize transitions in their own window or palette. Transition windows usually vary slightly from program to program, but the basics are the same.

How do you decide which transition you want to use? The fancy transitions may look really cool, but you may want to use some restraint when choosing them. Remember that you want the actual video content to be the focus of your movie project, not showing off your editing skills or the capabilities of your editing software. More often than not, the best transition is a simple dissolve. If you do use a fancier transition, you may want to rely on the same or a similar transition throughout your project. This consistency makes the transitions seem to fit more seamlessly into the movie.