Learning About Transitions
A transition is a visual effect used to change from one clip in your edited sequence to
the next. In the early days of film editing, the only transition you could immediately
view was a cut. Even the simplest transition, the dissolve, had to be specially set up in
an optical printer and sent back to the editor for viewing. The whole process was
expensive and could take several days.
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Part III
Fine-Tuning Your Edit
Video made this process faster and easier. By mixing two video signals together, you
could watch a dissolve immediately and decide how you liked it. The more quickly you
can see how an effect will look, the more quickly you can refine it to suit your needs.
Film editors had to anticipate how transitions would look and how long they should
last without actually being able to preview them; there was never the time or budget
to try transitions during editing. It’s much easier to preview cross dissolves, fades, and
other transitions in a video system, and particularly in a nonlinear editing system. In
Final Cut Pro, you can continue to adjust a transition and preview it until you get it
just right.