Video editing glossary

You don't need the vocabulary to make a good video, but it helps when you're working out why one edit feels smooth and another feels choppy. Most of the difference in a talking-to-camera video comes from a handful of small choices at each cut: where the sound changes, where the picture changes, and how big the frame is.

Every entry covers the same ground, so you can skim to what you need:

• In plain words: one or two sentences for someone who has never opened an editing app.
• The technical detail: the same idea in timeline terms, with the tracks and edit points named.
• In a one-camera video: what the edit does when the whole video is you and a single framing.
• What Bang AI does: whether Auto Edit makes this edit for you, or whether it's yours to make by hand.
• What goes wrong: the signs that give a badly made one away.

The J cut and the L cut separate the sound edit from the picture edit, so one leads or trails the other. They are the reason a heavily trimmed video can still sound like one continuous thought, and Bang AI's Auto Edit adds both where it joins your lines.

The punch-in cuts to a tighter crop of the same shot. It gives a single camera angle somewhere to move and makes the small jumps left by removed fumbles look intentional. Auto Edit punches in on some lines for you.

Definitions only go so far. The video templates show these edits inside whole videos, such as a product review or an unboxing, shot by shot. For the tools that make them, the roundup of AI video editors compares how much of the cut each one does for you.

A creator filming at a desk rarely has a second angle, a crew or a sound person. What they have is one framing and a lot of trimmed fumbles. Every removed um leaves a join, and every join can be hidden with sound, a change of frame or both. The terms here are the small toolkit that turns a choppy one-take video into one that sounds like a single confident thought, which is what Auto Edit is built to do for you.