Editing & Post-Production

Whip pan transition

Also called: swish pan, whoosh transition

Whip out of shot A, whip into shot B, and cut on the blurriest frame in the middle. The eye cannot resolve detail during the movement, so the join disappears and the two locations feel connected.

A clean one means matching the direction and roughly the speed of both whips, which is easier if you shoot each deliberately with a couple of seconds of settled frame either side. Editors fake it with directional blur when the footage was never shot for it. A whoosh effect sells the move, though every whip pan in a video makes the next one weaker.

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