FCP jump cut transition

[Shane Ross]

Add a DIP TO COLOR dissolve and make the color WHITE.

Shane

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[Mark Suszko]

The white transition thing is a call-back to real film, and to do this effect “right”, i.e., to really “sell” it as a filmic discontinuity, you have to re-create the effects and physics that happen when a film camera is stopped and started, because THAT is what makes the classic white transition.

Now I am by no means a motion picture film “expert”, but my experience of what happens when you suddenly stop a film camera is, the film keeps going thru the gate a fraction longer, due to some inertia in the film and the sprockets and other mechanicals of the camera… but slowing down all that time. Slowing the film thru the gate over-exposes it, so that’s where the ramping-up of the levels to blown-out all white happens.

At that same time, the film going thru the gate and shutter at ever-decreasing speed, projected back later at normal speed, looks like everything the camera sees suddenly races off into fast motion.

So, to simulate these goings-on in the gate in a video version of the effect, you should add a little speed-up effect over the last 10-15 frames, at the same time the levels are ramping up to white, and I would suggest adding some yellow-orange to the first part of the white transition, because I always recall such discontinuities in pieces of film going warm in their color balance as well, from my super-8 days in junior high.

You might also add just a tad of x-y position change in there as well to hint at some gate weave as the tension in the film going thru the pressure plate is released when the motor dies, or more blatantly the fact that a hand-held camera person normally releases their steady aiming at the same time they let go of the motor trigger, so the shot will want to start wandering off-axis over those few frames, mimicking the wrist relaxing and the arm dropping down away from the cameraman’s face…

That may be a lot to simulate over 10-15 frames, but I think it’s what you really want, if the actual look of the film version of these camera stops is what you’re after. Again, I’m not a film guy.

Funny that from my first days learning about editing film and video, these artifact things were taught as things to cut out, eliminate, and avoid as unprofessional “mistakes”. And now that the popular trend is to give an unshaped, unstructured, guileless “verite'” look to everything, they are “effects” and part of the story-telling arsenal, used, as you are using them, as deliberate transitional devices trying to make the cut seem as if no editing had taken place at all.