Edit Breakdown: J-cuts, Zooms, and the 3 second rule

I was browsing YouTube yesterday looking for a video to break down this week, when I came across a great video by Answer In Progress. I figured, why not break it down? 

I went even deeper into this breakdown than I did last week. I downloaded the video from YouTube and reverse engineered the timeline to learn as much as possible. 

I hope you all can learn from this break down just as I did. 

Here's the reverse engineered timeline:

• V4 = VFX

• V3 = TEXT

• V2 = B-ROLL

• V1 = A-ROLL

B-ROLL & A-ROLL

Sometimes creators don't use B-roll that helps move the story along, but in this video, ever piece of B-roll helped to tell the complete story of the video. It would interrupt the A-ROLL to provide necessary context to the narration of the current scene. Even the sponsorship was well integrated with B-roll because they didn't just use B-roll of the service. The creator actually used the sponsor's service to create something that was useful to the video. 

THE 3 SECOND RULE

Beyond A-roll and B-roll, you can see many many cuts in the timeline above. I was curious what the average length of a clip was in this video. So I looked a the total frames of each clip then calculated the average frames of a clip and turned that into a timecode. 

It turns out that the average length of a clip in this video was approximately 4 seconds. 

That is pretty much standard. As it turns out there is the 3 second rule in digital media. This rule states that approximately every 3 seconds you want to cut or change something visually for the audience to keep them engaged. Now you can't just go and cut every three seconds and make your edit predictable. Use good judgement on when to cut, but it's a good guideline to start with so you can tell if your audience might start to lose attention. 

Counter to the rule though would be if you build enough trust with your audience where you don't have to cut or change something every 3 seconds. 

THE BEAUTY OF J-CUTS

To help with the transitions between cuts, many big YouTubers use J-Cuts. And Answer in Progress used them masterfully in this video. I didn't even notice them until I went in and started breaking down the video frame-by-frame. 

Using a j-cut effectively can be hard in a situation where you're just trying to cut out unnecessary silences. The editor did this well by holding onto a clip for just a few frames longer to get the first word or couple of words out before the next cut started. As you watch you won't notice the audio blending because of the short length of time that clips is held to allow for the J-cut.

ZOOMS KEEP US ENGAGED

Zooms a specific points can do two things:

• Keep us engaged

• Add emotion to a scene

In this video they do both. In some scenes the zooms make you feel like you're getting into the host's head while in others they're just there to keep you engaged. Sometimes the host was talking about a complex topic, so the zoom was placed for engagement, but also to create the effect that it was an important point. 

But just like everything else in this video, the zooms were done tastefully. They didn't get in the way of the enjoyment of the video.

CONCLUSION & VIDEO

Overall, I thought this video was extremely well done. I don't have much, if anything, I would do differently.

I might’ve added a couple more animations for more context or humor in some areas. Might’ve taken out the intro of clips from the video to get right into it, but I’m not 100% sure.

Ultimately, I hope this edit breakdown taught you more about how a channel with 1 million subs edits their videos.

If there is a video you’d like me to breakdown or something you’d like to see me add to the breakdowns, please let me know.

Until next week…