Granted, scripting makes things a lot easier, but sitting in front of a camera and talking for three to ten minutes solid is no easy task. ComedyĪ well-timed jump cut can be pretty funny. Well, it turns out fast talkers are more persuasive and, while a jump cutting YouTube might not be a particularly fast talker in day to day life, jump cuts allow them to create the impression of fast speech by cutting out the gaps between sentences. You might have a point you are trying to get across or the persuasion might just be that you want them to keep watching. One way or another, you are trying to persuade your viewers of something. It is said that, on average, you will spend five hours editing for every one hour of footage you recorded, so this is certainly an area to focus on when trying to save time. And, when they are trying to upload multiple videos a week-often around a job or education-anything that saves time on the overall process of making the video will be welcomed. Almost all YouTubers start out doing everything for themselves, including editing. Jump cuts are quite possibly the lowest-effort method of cutting a video together, short of paying someone else to do it for you. If you have a lot to get through, jump cuts can be a great way to keep the overall time of the video down, since excessively long runtimes can be off-putting in certain niches. If the YouTuber suddenly cuts from one position to another, that’s just the style of the video. On a very similar note to the last one, jump cuts provide a handy method for cutting out some of the more awkward pauses, sniffles, sneezes, and mistakes that might otherwise have required a reshoot of a particular part of the video.Īs we mentioned above, the fact that jump cuts are now something viewers are used to makes it possible to use jump cuts to edit out mistakes without having to worry about continuity between the remaining footage. Jump cuts allow a YouTube to speed up the flow of their video so that the beats of the content hit closer together, leaving the viewer less time to become disinterested and click away to something else. Sure, the subject matter of a video can be enough to draw people in if they are interested enough, but on an online platform like YouTube, dry, slow content will not bring in the new viewers. You don’t need to be an expert in psychology to understand that the average attention span of a human being, shall we say, not what it used to be. So, now that you know what a jump cut is, why do YouTubers use them? There are a few reasons why this technique is so popular, so we’ve broken them up into the big ones. Of course, it is still a jump if it does cut from one scene to another-the established definition still applies when relevant-it is just that, on YouTube, it is more often used in this manner. What would once have been considered messy, unprofessional editing is now a style, and viewers have become used to it and don’t wonder what’s gone wrong with the video when jump cuts happen and the YouTuber snaps from one position to another. This is possible because the idea of YouTube jump cuts is established. Jump cuts on YouTube are far more often used to cut from one part of a scene to a later part of a scene, essentially snipping out the intervening footage.

In the context of YouTube, a jump cut does not need to cut to a different scene, and often doesn’t. This is the definition of a jump cut as it applies to things like television and cinema, but the YouTube variant is a little different. That is, no fading in and out, no special effects, just one frame you are looking at one scene, and the next frame you are looking at a different one. The proper definition of a jump cut is a sudden transition from one scene to another. We’re going to answer both of those questions and more, so settle in, and let’s get started.

But why do they do it? Or, for that matter, what is it? That being said, even today there are plenty of channels that make use of the technique, with perennial favourites like Philip DeFranco-who arguably helped push jump cutting to the forefront of YouTube consciousness-still doing their thing all these years later. If you are moving around the screen it helps the video flow better and gives the viewer something new to focus on, preventing viewer fatigue. YouTubers use jump cuts to speed up the pace of the video, to hide mistakes and/or to keep you engaged for longer than just simple talking head videos. While the depth and breadth of content that can be found on YouTube has grown immensely since the early days of wall to wall vloggers, it seems as though the jump cut will forever be considered synonymous with YouTube.

Jumpcut definition