Re: Editing An Interview w/o B-roll

You can also do wipes, or full-screen pushes, depends on how many times you need to do it, too many gets annoying. You need to spank your cameraman for not changing the camera framing between responses, this is just basic good practice, unless you're shooting a deposition, and it takes literally a second to zoom in or out and re-frame the shot, plenty of times you can do this while someone is taking a deep breath or swallowing or otherwise pausing, (...or while the question off-camera is being asked, is when I do it.)

But maybe you can fake it: This works best if you shot in HD but the final product is SD: you can zoom in and re-frame the wider shots to tighter ones, to imitate what the cameraman was supposed to have done.

I have also been able to do this, to a much more limited extent, with 4x3 SD footage, but sometimes, all you need to change is a few percent with the fake zoom to result in a shot that cuts well without looking like a jump cut. Some left-right re-poisitioning on the input side may also help this effect.

With SD footage you generally can't (IMO) push in more than 10 or 15% without getting too many artifacts, but then again, once you make the cut, you can quickly keyframe a very subtle zoom back out to the full-rez original framing, and it all looks more or less intentional.

Another simple fix is to freeze-frame the outgoing clip or ramp it into slo-mo for one second, with the audio ducked down, and then use that as a base to dissolve a new clip in over it.


Sometimes, if the jump cut is really subtle, you might try a morph transition. There's one in Apple Motion.


Another way to go with this is to layer the shots in boxes, the new one deliberately smaller, and do a fade transition to bring that box in, start fadign out the old full-frame background, then a cut or dissolve to full-frame of the new clip where applicable. A little audio work laying the audio fades will help, if you lead the incoming shot audio.

A lot of the choices depend on the exact nature of the footage and what you're trying to communicate. You should try to experiment and see what you come up with.