my experience with film impact transitions

The fade in and fade out usually signal the beginning or end of a scene, especially if the filmmaker is fading to/from black. The L cut allows the viewer to read the emotion on the listener's face, as the dialogue continues over, as we see in this clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off: 5.

Imagine how a simple conversation between two people might look if all we ever got was a ping-pong edit back and forth between the two people talking. Split edits like these are especially effective in portraying conversations. Of course, with digital editing, one doesn't need to physically cut anything anymore, but the transition is still widely used, and the name has remained the same. A different camera angle, or scene was then spliced into the spot where the old picture was, so the audio from the old footage was now cut over the new footage. In the L Cut transition, the editor traditionally cut the picture frames out of the strip, but left the narrow audio track intact, thus creating an L-shape out of the film. The audio track on a strip of celluloid film runs along the side, near the sprocket holes. The L Cut, also called a split edit, is a very cool technique whose name dates back to the old analog film days. The first shows the clock wipe the second, the diagonal wipe (pay no attention to the broken blocks at the start of the second clip-that's a technical glitch, not part of the film). Here are two good examples from The Empire Strikes Back. The Star Wars films are chock-full of attention-grabbing wipes. Other wipe shapes include stars, diamonds, and the old turning clock.

The best example of the wipe is what's known as the Iris Wipe, which you usually find in silent films, like Buster Keaton's or the Merrie Melodies cartoons-the circle getting smaller and smaller. This transition is the opposite of the dissolve in that it draws attention to itself.

The above video offers a great overview of the cut, with examples. The process usually happens so subtly and so quickly, the viewer isn't even aware of the transition. As the first clip is fading out, getting lighter and lighter, the second clip starts fading in, becoming more and more prominent. The dissolve is an editing technique where one clip seems to fade-or dissolve-into the next.

My experience with film impact transitions