Shot length
Also known as: clip duration, shot duration
How long an individual shot stays on screen, which is decided by what it has to show rather than by any rule about pacing.
Updated
What it means
Each shot has a minimum and a maximum. The minimum is how long it takes to read; the maximum is how long before it stops adding anything. The gap is narrower than it sounds.
Reading time depends on content. A wide landscape needs longer than a close-up, and an unfamiliar scene needs longer than a repeat of something already established earlier in the same sequence.
The statistic across a whole edit is the Average shot length, which describes a sequence rather than any shot in it. One is a decision, the other is a description.
How it works in practice
Three seconds is a useful default for action. Long enough to read a trick, short enough that nothing stalls, and a reference point to vary from deliberately. The default is a starting point rather than an answer to anything.
Varying it is what creates rhythm. Two short shots and a long one reads as deliberate, and Pacing is largely the pattern formed by these durations rather than their average across a piece.
Music supplies the grid. Shots sized to musical phrases rather than to whole seconds land better, which is what cutting against a Beat grid produces. Phrases are rarely round numbers.
What to watch out for
Uniform lengths are the most common failure. Every shot at the same duration reads as a slideshow regardless of content, and a viewer stops expecting anything to change at all.
Holding too long is the other. Dead time at the end of a shot is the main reason an edit drags, and trimming out points is the fix rather than removing whole clips.
Slow motion changes the arithmetic. A clip at quarter speed occupies four times the screen time, so Slow motion has to be budgeted rather than applied wherever it happens to look good.
How RawClip handles it
Shot durations follow the action and the music rather than a fixed figure, so a dense moment holds longer than a transition does. Clips are trimmed to the readable part, which is why the result is short without feeling rushed through.