iMovie HD 6 & iDVD 6 for Mac OS X: Visual Quickstart Guide

11. Transitions

Transitions can be equally wonderful and terrible things. They can move you from one scene to another without the abruptness of a straightforward cut, or help define a movie’s pace by easing you gently into or out of a scene.

But transitions can also become a distraction, because you’re introducing motion or visuals that weren’t recorded by the camera. Too many transitions can be like using too many fonts in a word processing application: pretty soon, all you see is the style, not the content.

My best advice is to let the content determine the transition, if one is even needed: most of the time, a jump cut (moving from one clip to another without a transition) is all that’s required. I’m not saying you should skip this chapter—rather, ...