Do you have an interview with someone on camera that has a lot of flubs, stutters, or utterances? If so, you may be looking for a way to remove those on screen mistakes and still have an edit that looks seamless. DaVinci Resolve has a great tool for fixing these mistakes, known as the smooth cut effect, which will not tip off your viewers that you removed large chunks of an interview.

What Is A Smooth Cut Effect?

A smooth cut transition is a video transition effect that essentially blends two pieces of footage together. It's much more than a simple dissolve between two video clips, since the smooth cut transition will create additional frames by morphing the two surrounding clips together. This can be a great way to shift someone's head in the proper position between two interview shots, or subtly blend together changes in their mouth movement.

Competing software like Adobe Premiere have a similar effect, known as a morph cut, but it can be quite buggy and not even work at times. You'll find that DaVinci Resolve can provide consistent results that work every time you need it.

Setting Up Your Sequence

Load your interview footage into DaVinci Resolve under the media tab, then create a new sequence that matches your footage in terms of frame size and frame rate. This will help keep your interview footage at the same size at the end when it comes time to export it.

Editing The Interview Footage

Play the interview back, and each time there is a pause or utterance that you want to remove, use the razor blade tool to cut these instances out of the interview. Close the gap that you created in the timeline by bringing the clips together.

Applying the Smooth Edit Effect

The smooth edit effect is located in the video effects tab, and you apply it by dragging it to your sequence as if it was a video transition. Keep in mind that the default length of the smooth edit may be very long by default, so try to shorten it to just 2 or 4 frames of video.

Play the sequence back to see how the smooth edit looks in motion. You should see some very subtle morphing that joins the two parts of the interview together to form a seamless edit.

This is just one of the great features of DaVinci Resolve. To learn more about what this software can do, seek out training on how to use advanced techniques.