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Tutorial: How to Perfect an Edit with Finishing Touches

In this article, we’re going behind the scenes on one of our edits that was stuck at the 90% completion mark and needed some professional polish. Let’s look at how our editing and review process worked for this cut and most of our projects here at FEP.

Hey, my name is Chris, lead trainer at Film Editing Pro. I was working on a teaser edit for one of our courses, and came across a few areas that needed final touches. The focus of this tutorial will be on fixing an awkward transition.

The Problem

Watch the clip below:

Animated text appears in front of a person typing on a keyboard. The text begins to move off screen, but it cuts to a scene of some editors working at a computer
Notice the abrupt transition as the text begins to move off screen

The issue here is that when the text flies in it’s animated, but when it flies out there’s no animation with it, which makes it feel clunky and abrupt. The other problem is that this particular clip is cut from another finished edit, and I don’t have the source graphic. This means that we have to think of some different ways to fix it.

After some tweaking and brainstorming, we came up with five possible ways to smooth out this clunky edit. I’ll list each possible fix and explain why each one works better or worse.

Slipping or Speeding?

The first solution we came up with was to adjust the shot so the animation at the end isn’t cut off. This can be done by trimming or slipping the footage within the boundaries of the clip. However, it doesn’t work as intended, because another unwanted shot comes on during the animation. Ideally we should have the source graphic to fix this, but sometimes as an editor you have to use what you have access to.

A clip is edited, which accidentally reveals a cut to some unwanted footage
Slipping the footage reveals a cut to an undesired shot (Option 1)

Instead of slipping, we could speed up the shot so it animates on and off sooner. This is problematic for the same reason, as the unwanted shot still appears at the end, but it will probably work in many other cases, so it’s worth considering this solution when finessing your shots.

In non-linear editing software, an editor changes the speed of a clip to 143%
increasing the speed of the clip encounters the same problem as the previous solution (Option 2)

Animating a Solution

A third option is to use animated effects to manually animate it off at the end. We could achieve this by adding a horizontal push as a transition between the two clips. On it’s own, the push appears clunky and abrupt, because there’s no easing to the motion.

An improved transition from animated text to the next shot of two editors working
Even if you don’t hear the sound design, the other effects sell the transition much better (Option 3)

I added some directional blur, as well as some keyframes so the effect ramps up towards the end of the transition. After rotating the direction of the blur, adding a whoosh and some easing, it becomes a fairly seamless transition.

Back to Basics

Sometimes a simpler solution is better, so what about a hard cut at the end before the graphic starts to animate off? I can achieve this by cutting the clip at the frame the out animation, and removing that all together.

An example of a hard cut to another shot, instead of a transition
Cutting before the text begins to move off works quite well (Option 4)

Not bad, but the hand in the background is moving as it cuts, which makes the cut feel abrupt. To fix this, we can slow down the speed of the clip to make it last until the next shot. Normally you wouldn’t slow footage down this much, but in this case we can get away with it.

Building off of the previous solution, we could add a simple dip to black. This also works well, but it’s very similar to the hard cut. Which one you choose might depend on personal preference, or the style of the edit you’re going for.

A 'Dip to black' transition
Using a dip to black in a similar fashion to the hard cut (Option 5)

Wrap Up

We’ve come up with five different ways of improving this awkward transition. After discussing all the options, we went with option 4, as it’s the simplest solution. After reviewing this process, hopefully you can see that although the resulting edit seems quite simple, it took a lot of finessing to achieve this.

The solution that gets used - a hard cut with slowed animated text.
The solution that gets used – a hard cut with slowed animated text (Option 4)

Many editors can get a cut to 90% quality, but the last 10% makes all the difference. Editors who can polish a cut to near perfection get the best jobs.

For more tutorials about creative editing in general be sure to visit our training page. Or more specifically, trailer editing – sign up for our free video series and get more information about our full course.

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