My coworker told me I paused too much during fight scenes and it changed how I edit

I was editing a 26-episode mecha series and always left long pauses between explosions for drama. One of the senior editors finally said, 'You're cutting out the kinetic energy, let the movement carry the scene.' I started trimming those pauses by half a second and the pacing felt totally different. Now I watch other shows and notice how tight their action cuts are. Has anyone else had feedback that completely flipped how you approach a specific type of scene?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyw971mo ago

Got told once that my "dramatic pauses" were just me being lazy with the edit... turns out they were right all along. Yeah, I had a similar moment cutting a car chase scene. I kept stopping every time a tire screeched to let the sound hang there. The director basically said "stop trying to make every second count like it's a poem" and just let the chaos flow from shot to shot. Felt stupid for weeks after that but damn did it make my cuts better.

the_adam1mo ago

How'd you figure out the rhythm difference between letting a sound breathe and just killing momentum with those pauses? Like was it a specific cut where it finally clicked for you or more of a gradual thing?

mia74821d ago

I mean I gotta push back a little here, like yeah I get where @nancyw97 and the original post are coming from but I actually think there's a whole different side to this. In my experience those dramatic pauses can be exactly what sells the weight of a big explosion or a mech crash, especially if you're working on something that's more about atmosphere than non-stop action. Trimming everything by half a second might work for a kinetic car chase but for a mecha series where each hit feels huge sometimes you need that half second of silence to let the viewer actually feel the impact instead of just rushing past it. I've seen editors go too far the other way too where they cut so tight it just becomes a blur of noise and you lose any sense of tension or consequence. So take this with a grain of salt but maybe your original instinct wasn't entirely wrong, it might just be about picking your spots rather than trimming everything across the board.