50 Video Editing Terms Every Creator Should Know
Video editing has its own vocabulary, and tutorials often assume you already know it. This glossary covers the terms that come up constantly for short-form and creator editing, explained in plain English.
Timeline & structure
- Timeline — the horizontal track where your clips, audio, and effects are arranged in order
- Keyframe — a marked point where a property (position, scale, opacity) is set to a specific value, letting the software animate between points
- Jump cut — cutting between two shots of the same subject without changing angle
- J-cut / L-cut — when audio from the next or previous clip starts before or after the visual cut, smoothing the transition
- Match cut — a cut between two shots with similar composition or motion, making the transition feel seamless
Visual terms
- B-roll — supplementary footage cut over your main shot
- Aspect ratio — the width-to-height shape of your frame (16:9, 9:16, 1:1)
- Color grading — adjusting a video's color and tone for mood or consistency
- Chroma key — removing a solid-color background (usually green) to composite a new one
- LUT — a preset color transformation applied to footage for a consistent look
Audio terms
- Ducking — automatically lowering music volume when dialogue is present
- Room tone — ambient background noise recorded in silence, used to smooth audio cuts
- Sound design — the deliberate use of sound effects and audio layers to enhance a scene
Export & delivery
- Bitrate — how much data is used per second of video; higher generally means better quality at a larger file size
- Codec — the compression format a video is encoded in (H.264 is the most common for web delivery)
- Render — the process of processing all edits into a final exported video file
Now that you know the terms, put them to work — EseCut's timeline supports all of the above natively.
Open the editor