Re: Cheating

Charlie, here we call that a "zero-frame trim" or "single-frame dissolve".

I will admit only to using it one time as a test, to see if a client was serious about a change that was going to undo several hours of work. All for the placement of an eyeblink in an A-B-roll sequence of some twenty dissolves. Had they said it still looked bad, I would have heaved a big sigh, pushed the buttons for real, and written off another night of dinner with the family. Lucky for everyone, essentially seeing one extra preview was all we needed to see it really wasn't an issue, avoid the unnecessary change. Sometimes just changing the pre-roll length made a difference in how people perceived a cut. Man, I am SO glad not to be cutting dissolves on linear systems anymore. Though I still have a warm spot for the Grass 141. I use it maybe once a month, mostly for cuts-only news now, so I'm staring to forget the more esoteric functions we never use anymore. My FCP skills are growing to compensate though, and I'm happy for the trade.

I find that after a lot of concentrated viewing of a very tiny piece of the puzzle, you need to periodically go back sometimes and watch everything from the beginning, as one whole, to re-establish what the overall flow and feel was. Kind of a 'forest for the trees' kind of thing. That is lost time, sure, but far better than losing your course on the entire edit and getting a bad product that was rushed. You often see the work in a different light on these breaks and find errors or things that need changing to work even better.