Talking Head Transitions

Hi,

I'm cutting down an on camera podium speech. There is absolutely no b-roll to cover up my edits. I hate using dissolves on talking heads. I've tried a gradient wipe which is a little more forgiving, but do any of you have any suggestions for other transitions that could help smooth out my edits?

As always, your advise is much appreciated.

Shelley

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

Using HDV, I find that zooming in on the shot in the motion tab is pretty forgiving to a certain point...sometimes I'll cut to a "closeup" of the talking head and cut back to the wide shot.

This won't work in every situation, but if it does in yours, consider yourself lucky!

Otherwise, I'd try to find some photos of whatever the speaker is talking about, or something that's related somehow.


Casey
www.unitedvideoinc.com

cut away to a background texture with supporting type, then cut back to the person sometimes works...

> I hate using dissolves on talking heads. I've tried a gradient wipe which is a little more forgiving

You can also use a SpinBack 3D or something similar, put a graphic background (if you don't have them, turn a pre-existing shot black and white, or super-saturate, then add blur, etc.) over the transition. I assume you were using a single camera to shoot? If so, your operator should have been "editing in-camera" with slow creeps and subtle changes.

Many transitions work here; what you have to do is choose your points carefully, and you may need to establish time passage.


www.derekmok.com

Also try doing a fast zoom in, say for 3 frames or so, and adding a frame or two of white at the end. Adjust audio accordingly. Makes for a nice quick cut that signals a jump in time to the viewer.

The G-Blur dissolve done over 8-10 frames does a soft job of confusing the eye without looking like a harsh jump that may disturb.. You can adjust the amount of blur of either A or B as it dissolves.

Marcus T
iCreate! digital|post
12 Core Mac Pro, Snow Leopard, FCP 7.0.3, 8Gb Memory.

I usually fall back to a photo flash transition. It covers the jump in head position. It's become so common in news and docs that viewers accept it.

Could always go with the good old fade to black or white to move further on in the dialogue, only really good for a definitive change in the subject matter or passing of time effect. But its worked for me on occasions.
As has the HDV re-size mentioned earlier but with a 0.5 sec crossfade between shots. That can work quite nicely........

These are all great ideas. The only problem with lots of fades or dissolves is when you are sending your finished product to the web. Dissolves and fades look really crappy on the web no matter how good your encoding is. Otherwise one of these good ideas will suit you fine.

Michael Horton
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Thanks for all the suggestions.

Mike thanks for the reminder regarding transitions on the web.

I use the "flash" a lot -- but it's too grandiose for this video.

Cutting to a more zoomed in shot was a good one too, but I'm not working in HD so shot gets fuzzy.

The 8 frame G-blur is a nice alternative to the standard dissolve.


>>Also try doing a fast zoom in, say for 3 frames or so, and adding a frame or two of white at the end. Adjust audio accordingly. Makes for a nice quick cut that signals a jump in time to the viewer.>>

I'm looking more for "uninterrupted" continuity transitions. But this technique sounds great for time passage. I'm not sure how to do this though, so could you please elaborate more?

Thanks.

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

Michael, you have so little faith in us compressionists and modern codecs. These days it's possible to do a good encode with a dissolve if the data rate is reasonably high and the duration is short.

BTW that's another reason why I find the camera flash works so well. With an extremely short duration the codec may well plant a key frame.

It also depends on how often you need to do these transitions as far as what would look good done once or twice, versus done 15-20 times.

How many transitions are you dealing with roughly?

There will be at least 10-15 within a 20 minute timeline.

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

One of my favorites if you are going to acknowledge to the viewer that the content is edited is a simple left to right wipe with a medium white border. The bar catches your eye so the jump cut is not disturbing to watch.

It also pretty simple to encode as only a small portion of each video frame is in changing.

-Vance

A simple quick 6 frame dip down to black & 6 frames back up works as well...or if you have an associated logo, you could use that as a wipe across the screen.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I'll often use a 10-frame center-to-edge wipe with a little edge feather. But you know what I'd like to see? Somebody using an artfully quick MORPH from out to in frame.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Set your customized window layout 1 or 2 by holding Option then click
Window menu>Arrange>and select Set Custom Layout 1 or 2 !

Then use Custom Layout 1 or 2 with Shift-U or Option-U !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Loren Miller Wrote:
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Somebody using an artfully quick MORPH from out to in frame.]

I've been thinking about trying that for about the last 10 years!
Unfortunately times when I haven't been busy and times when I remember about trying it have never coincided.

Now I've lost the morphing program I used to have (I think it was called Morph! or MorphIt! or something) but that was back in the days of Premiere 5 on PC.

I noticed on Apple downloads recently there was a freeware morphing App -but most of the free ones I've seen rely more on dissolve than morphing -haven't had chance to try this one yet.

Any recommendations for a good free (or cheap) morphing App that will output to a useful format?
James
PS Sorry if this is too much of a thread hijack!!

I have a client itching to try a morph on an element we produce. Shake has a tool in it, and I just saw this yesterday, tho haven't tried it yet.

[www.chv-plugins.com]

That CHV one looks good and a great price too! Thanks

>I'm looking more for "uninterrupted" continuity transitions. But this technique sounds great for
>time passage. I'm not sure how to do this though, so could you please elaborate more?

Sounds like a tough one. Even dissolves could be tough to manage if your subject is an excessively active speaker. "Louder" transitions like cube spins/slides/wipes should be cool. But hey, i once had an interview with a doctor and he was so still, i could do a straight cut, extract a sentence, and you won't even know it!

Personally I prefer a simple right to left push for this. To me, the key issue is speed. A short push of 3 to 5 frames may be appropriate for upbeat or comic material but too jarring for more serious subject matter. If you go to a 10 or 15 frame push, it is far less jarring and supports the tone of the speaker. As a viewer, I believe we accept this convention after seeing it a couple of times.

Nearly any technique can be "worked into" the style of the piece as long as the aesthetic is consistent. That said, I disagree with Craig above -- I find the photo flash to be one of the most pretentious and overused devices in modern multimedia. People spray this technique all over anything now, and there are just as many successful instances as bad ones where the style of the piece should be restrained, and the flash is far too "glitzy-hip" for the piece.

When the content is king, I actually often do a technique I hate, the jump cut. Martin Scorsese did it well in The Last Waltz. It's ugly, but it's either that or waiting for 10 minutes while the drugged-up musicians try to finish their thought. Instead, Scorsese chose the most direct path to get to their words, and it came off just fine. If jump cuts don't work, I'd vote for Joe's suggestion, a simple fade to black and back up. Make sure sound also fades out, though -- with that device you'd have to make it blatant that there's an omission/time passage.


www.derekmok.com

When it's a speaker mid sentence I can't see a fade working. Dissolves can look strange due to head position.

It's either a jump or a flash and one is assuming the jump cut isn't working or why ask the question in the first place. The flash of just 3 frames or so is enough for the brain to not focus on the change in continuity. The flash has become so common (culturally accepted) that it's often not consciously noticed. I've edited so many interviews that unless you really have to butcher a speaker, that doing this every few minutes doesn't seem to distract.

If you are genuinely and obviously going to some point later in the speech any number of devices pointed out above can work. I have not yet found anything better than a flash for piecing two sections to become one sentence/thought.

> When it's a speaker mid sentence I can't see a fade working.

I can't see a flash working there, either, myself. The only true way to do that is with coverage. Mid-sentence edits mean you're trying to maintain an illusion of continuity. A flash, to me, most definitely disrupts continuity. Agree to disagree?


www.derekmok.com

>A flash, to me, most definitely disrupts continuity.

Agreed. Lol. I actually thought i typed in my disdain for flashes used to hide jump cuts. They don't. The thelma schoonmaker/scorcese jumpcutting is a pretty cool technique, but i usually prefer to use that on action- adds a very nice candid effect.

I personally would also go for the flash, because it says 'I'm letting you know there was an edit here, so some time has passed, but we're not trying to hide that fact.'

It's not about hiding, it's about letting the audience know something is missing. Like someone said, if it was hiding you were after, a really clean morph would be the way to do it. It's not that hard to do anymore.

Also, the flash is a great interruptive edit that can make the audience accept all kinds of wild leaps.

Overused? I dunno, is it used more than the 'If-you-can't-solve-it-dissolve-it method?

> Overused? I dunno, is it used more than the 'If-you-can't-solve-it-dissolve-it method?

One producer actually asked me, on five projects back to back over three years, to use a "needle off the record" noise. Five projects! I also came in on a promo she was trying to get a local (down south) editor/assistant editor to cut, and he was using photo flashes like there was no tomorrow...
while completely neglecting to find the actual good pieces from the TV show he was supposed to be promoting.

I just think there are devices that are old as moldy cheese. To many producers, white flashes make any edit "smooth". Thus eliminating the need to, you know, actually edit the damn footage and pay attention to content. I use photo flashes sometimes; they just have to fit the style of the piece, and they better be saying something rather than just an ellipsis.


www.derekmok.com

Ahh, you've been traumatized in the past. Post WF Trauma Syndrome.

I agree that if you can you don't use anything. Make the cut work by choosing well. But if you've only got a guy giving a speech, and you need to take some out, there's not a lot of decisions you can make. In this case, I would use a short sharp flash.

If it was for commercial TV I would include a 'swoosh', just cause I know that would drive you even crazier.

Cross zoom! Cross zooms in my dreams! My nightmares! What have hip-hop videos done to us?


www.derekmok.com

>If it was for commercial TV I would include a 'swoosh', just cause I know that would drive you
>even crazier.

Haha. That reminds me of an editor friend of mine. Not one tv show of his has gone out without his white flash with a whoosh sound. We were even thinking of putting the whoosh on the lower third, but it was going to be troublesome to remove it for the clean (textless) version, not to mention the mountains of amendments we have to make... And well, we never found a suitable whoosh for that.

What else is real cool, is the double flash. It's so commonly used in the X-men arcade games of the 1990s, along with the push slides from both directions.