Transitions

Transition is the general name for any shaped handoff between two shots. A dissolve, a wipe, an iris, a whip pan or a fade all sit under it.

The word is useful when planning and useless when prompting. Deciding that a scene needs a transition is a start, and the shape you pick is what the audience actually reads.

Pick the specific device before anything else, because each one means something different. Dissolves pass time. Wipes move sideways. Fades end things. Whip pans keep momentum.

Then match the device to the cut it is covering. A long dissolve across a jump of years works. The same dissolve inside one conversation makes the scene unreadable.

Almost every transition in this group is built in an edit rather than in a prompt, because a model returns one continuous clip. The exception is a camera move that carries the change inside a single shot.

Reach for a shaped transition when a hard cut would be too blunt: across time, across a large jump in place, or at the end of an act.

Leave it alone the rest of the time. Most joins in most films are hard cuts, and reaching for a shape by default makes a film feel like a slideshow.

A match cut is a hard cut that relies on the two shots resembling each other. A transition adds a drawn shape on top of the join. One uses the images, the other adds a layer.

Within the family, the useful split is whether both images are visible at once. Dissolves overlap, wipes and irises divide, and fades show one image at a time.

Writing transition in a prompt leaves the choice to the model, and the result is usually a camera move or a slow blur. Name the device you want instead.

The second failure is applying a shape to a join that did not need one. If a hard cut reads clearly, use it, because a transition on top of a working cut only slows it down.