Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 747)

This chapter covers the following:
• Learning About Transitions (p. 747)
• Adding Transitions Between Clips (p. 751)
• Moving, Copying, and Deleting Transitions (p. 757)
• Modifying Transitions in the Timeline (p. 759)
• Working with Default and Favorite Transitions (p. 762)
• Detecting Duplicate Frames over Transitions (p. 764)
• Video Transitions That Come with Final Cut Pro (p. 764)
• Using Alpha Transitions (p. 769)
You can add cross dissolves and other transitions between cuts to make your program
more interesting. You can also add a cross fade audio transition to smooth abrupt changes
in audio.
Learning About Transitions
A transition is a an 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.
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.
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Adding Transitions 47