Whoosh
Also known as: swish, transition sound
A short rising or sweeping sound effect placed across a cut, used to carry the viewer out of one shot and into the next one.
Updated
What it means
A whoosh is a sweep rather than an impact. Where a hit marks an instant, a whoosh occupies the handful of frames either side of a cut and smooths the join by filling it with movement.
It works because it gives the ear something continuous while the picture changes discontinuously. The cut is still a cut, and the sound makes it read as a move rather than as a break.
It pairs naturally with camera movement. A Whip pan transition and a whoosh reinforce each other, because the sound describes exactly the motion the picture is performing.
How it works in practice
Placement straddles the cut rather than sitting on it. Starting the effect a few frames early and letting it resolve just after the new shot begins is what makes it feel like one gesture.
Panning it across the stereo field adds the sense of travel that camera audio never supplies, which is one of the few places where Stereo width does real work in an action edit.
Level wants restraint. A whoosh that competes with the music draws attention to itself, while one sitting just under the track is felt rather than noticed.
What to watch out for
Using one on every cut destroys the effect within a few repetitions, and the edit starts to sound like a template rather than a video somebody made.
Whooshes over real sound can also contradict it. Sweeping across a cut that already has an engine note or a Wave sound underneath produces two conflicting descriptions of the same moment.
Library effects are recognisable too. A sweep used in thousands of videos is identifiable to anybody who watches many of them, in the same way a stock Impact hit is, and it dates the edit as surely as a decorative wipe would.
How RawClip handles it
Sweeping effects are used only where a cut genuinely carries movement, such as a pan into a new shot, and they are kept under the music rather than on top of it. They are not applied to every transition, because a device used everywhere stops being a device and becomes a habit.