The Case Against Transitions
Answers when to use video transitions
Open any editing application and there is a shelf of transitions, each with a name that suggests a problem it fixes. Whip, spin, zoom, glitch, light leak, film burn. In a year of client work, most of them are used perhaps twice.
That is not a matter of taste. It is that a transition exists to conceal a cut, and the first question about any cut you want to conceal is why you want to conceal it.
What a hard cut already does
The human eye is extremely good at following a cut with no help. Two shots, one after the other, and the viewer assembles the relationship without being told: this is later, this is elsewhere, this is the same thing from a different angle. That ability is why film works at all, and it costs nothing.
A transition interrupts that. It says: something is happening in the edit. Attention moves from what is in the frame to the fact that there is a frame. Unless you want that attention, the transition is a tax.
The four cases where a transition earns its place
A passage of time that the audience cannot otherwise infer. Same room, same clothes, six hours later. A dissolve does in half a second what a title card does in two.
A change of world. Going from a talking head to an animation, or from a real room to a product render. There is no spatial relationship to preserve, so a visible join is honest.
A stated conceit. If the film is on a grid of phones, stacking them is the idea, not a decoration. Motion that expresses the concept is not a transition, it is the content.
A deliberate interruption. A news-flash style cut can be the point, once. Twice is a template.
The four cases where it does not
Joining two shots that already follow. If shot B obviously comes after shot A, a wipe does not clarify; it delays. The viewer was already there.
Signalling energy. This is the most common reason a transition gets used, and it does the opposite. A film that needs to feel fast feels fast because the shots are strong and the cuts are confident. A zoom adds a beat of motion that is not in the material.
Hiding a bad cut. A transition over a mismatched cut is a louder version of the mismatched cut. Fix the frames or pick a different shot.
Making a brand film feel produced. Nothing about a light leak says brand film. It says template, and it dates the work to roughly the year the pack was released.
What to do instead
Cut on a match. A shape that carries across the join, a movement that continues, a colour that rhymes, a sound that bridges. A matching cut is invisible because it satisfies the eye, where a transition is visible because it distracts from the join. That is the actual craft, and it takes longer than dragging an effect onto a clip, which is why the effect panel is so popular.
The test
Watch the film with the transitions removed. Then watch it again. If nobody in the room mentions it, they were not needed. If the film suddenly feels more expensive, they never were.