- [Maxim] J-cuts and L-cuts are a classic editing approach

that allows you to blend the contents of two scenes.

It's a little bit more than

a cross dissolve or a cross fade.

When you perform a J-Cut or an L-Cut

the audio from one scene merges into the next,

giving the sense that that scene

in some way impacts or relates to the other.

I've got a perfect example in this sequence.

I have a noisy opening shot

and then a relatively quiet dialogue scene.

Let's take a look.

(city buzzing)

- Excuse me?

- [Maxim] It's quite abrupt

and that might be what you want to achieve creatively,

but let's see if we can merge these together.

I'm going to zoom in in the timeline panel

so we can see the join between these two clips.

And right now I have linking turned on on the timeline,

so when I select one of these clips,

for example the video part of the building smooth clip,

I'm getting its audio as well.

If I click this button at the top left

of the timeline panel, Linked Selection,

and then deselect by clicking

on the background of the timeline

or hitting the Escape key,

now I can click on any item in this sequence

and linking is ignored.

It's still there, Premier Pro still knows

that those video and audio clips are connected

but the linking is being ignored for now.

You can achieve a similar result,

if I turn this back on,

by holding Option on macOS or Alt in Windows.

Again though, I'll switch this off for now and deselect.

Next up, I have to decide whether

I want the video to come early or late.

Let's start out by having the video come early.

I'm going to hold Command here on macOS,

this is Control in Windows,

and just drag this edit left.

By holding down that modify key,

I'm getting a dual roller trim instead of a regular

or a ripple trim.

That means the first clip gets shorter

by exactly the amount the second clip gets longer.

Now let's take another look.

I'll click back a little

and press the space bar to play the video.

(city buzzing)

Well, we're certainly getting the impression

of one scene effect in the other, but it's very clumsy.

There's a big jump when the audio stops

from the previous scene.

So now I'm going to hold Command again

and this time I'm going to drag up over this edit

to select it, it's the same effect really as clicking,

and now I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut

to add an audio cross fade.

If you press Command or Control + D

you'll get a video transition.

If you press Shift, Command or Control + D

you'll get an audio transition,

but if you just press Shift + D

you'll get the default transition

for whatever the media type is that you select.

So you could quickly add transitions to lots of clips.

Let me show you that right here,

I'm lassoing to select, I'm pressing Shift + D,

everything gets a cross dissolve or a cross fade.

I just undo and deselect.

But in this case I'm selecting a transition

and pressing Shift + D and I know I'm going to get

an audio cross fade, because it's audio.

I'm going to want this cross fade to be much longer

so that the transition is not obtrusive.

So let's pull that out and have another look.

(city buzzing)

- Excuse me?

- [Maxim] Much better.

There's a quick way to achieve a J-cut or an L-cut

using the Shift + Q or Shift + W keyboard shortcuts as well.

With linking turned off as it is now,

I can position my play head

where I'd like the video cut to be,

turn off the audio track,

because I'm only working on the video one track,

and now if I press Shift + Q,

I'm performing an extend edit

from the beginning of the clip,

Shift + W would extend the end.

This is exactly the same result

as me performing a dual roller trim.

And of course, as you've probably guessed by now,

an L-cut is simply called an L-cut

because it creates an L shape,

the video comes in before the audio.

A J-cut creates a J shape,

the audio comes in before the video.

If you want more subtle control

over a J-cut or an L-cut,

of course you can put your audio on different tracks

and use manual key framing

to gently ease the audio out of one scene

and into another, but more often than not

an audio cross fade will do the trick.

(bright music)