Cutting techniques between shots—cut, dissolve, wipe, fade. Cut is default; everything else needs narrative justification.
How you connect two shots determines the rhythm and emotional texture of your film. The cut—the direct, immediate transition—is your standard weapon and should remain so. Everything else costs not only editing time but also the viewer's attention. A dissolve, a wipe, or a fade to black must be dramatically earned, otherwise they feel like delay rather than design.
In classic Hollywood editing, editors intuitively work with invisible transitions. The cut happens at the moment the viewer's eye is already distracted—a head movement, a scene change, an action. Dissolves signal a temporal jump or emotional continuity, for example, when transitioning between a daydream and reality, or between two locations within the same action. However, they also slow things down—use them consciously when you need silence. Wipes are more aggressive, almost documentary, and today can quickly seem cheap if not conceived as a visual stylistic device. Fades to black mark chapter changes or dramatic pauses—they are breaths in the film.
In your daily practice: Edit with cuts first, build your rhythm. If a section feels choppy, it's rarely due to a missing transition—usually it's the wrong shot or the wrong in and out points. Only when you truly need a psychological pause or a thematic connection between two spatially distant scenes—only then should you resort to a dissolve or similar. A good dissolve lasts 12–24 frames at 24fps, no longer. Anything less feels rushed, anything more drags.
Also pay attention to the sound edit: Sound can cut long before or after the image. This asynchronous montage is often more powerful than a parallel dissolve of both layers. A cut with a sound dissolve feels less dramatic than a pure image cut with continuous ambient sound from the new scene. The transition form follows the emotional architecture, not the other way around.