Cuts feel professional when they make a sound: a whoosh straddling a moving transition, an impact landing exactly on a hard cut, and a riser building into a reveal. Keep them near half the volume of your voice, and do not sound every cut. Zella ships 30 synthesized sound effects and an Auto Sound at Cuts pass that places one matched effect under every transition.
Play a well-edited short with your eyes closed and you can still hear the edit: little whooshes, soft impacts, risers that swell into moments. Now watch an amateur edit - visually it may have the same cuts, but they are silent, and the whole thing feels spliced rather than made. Sound design at cuts is the cheapest upgrade in editing, and it follows rules simple enough to memorize.
The three tools and what each is for
| Sound | What it is | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Whoosh | Air moving | Straddling a transition that moves - a slide, wipe or zoom. Starts just before the cut, peaks as the frames change, tails off just after, because it represents the motion itself. |
| Impact | A soft thud or hit | Exactly on a hard cut, or where a title, punch-in or reveal lands. On the cut, not near it: even 50 ms early reads as sloppy. |
| Riser | A build | Before the moment, not on it - the second ahead of your key claim. Starts quiet, swells, then stops dead where the moment lands. The abrupt stop is the effect. |
Three sounds, three jobs. Nearly every polished short you have seen uses only these.
For the underlying concepts, Apple's audio fundamentals is a clear primer on levels, headroom and why a mix that peaks correctly can still sound wrong.
Under the hood this is AVFoundation, Apple's media framework, which is what Mac editors use to compose the timeline and write the result back out.
Placement rules that keep it tasteful
- Half the volume of your voice, or less. SFX are felt more than heard. If a viewer consciously notices the whoosh, it is too loud. Around −6 dB relative to speech is a good default.
- Not every cut. Sound the cuts that matter - section changes, punch-ins, reveals. In a video cutting every 4-5 seconds, sounding every join turns the mix into a percussion track.
- Match the energy. A gentle crossfade gets a soft airy whoosh; a whip transition gets a sharp one; a hard cut to a big claim gets an impact. Mismatched energy is worse than silence.
- Mind the stack. If music is ducking under your voice, the SFX sits in a narrow band - keep effects short so they don't fight the duck.
Where the sounds come from
You don't need a sample-pack subscription. Zella ships 30 royalty-free effects - synthesized on-device - whooshes, impacts, risers, pops and UI clicks. Tap to preview, place at the playhead, then drag the sound on the timeline and it snaps under any cut or transition.
Better: the Auto Sound at Cuts pass places one matched effect under every transition in a single tap, applying exactly the placement rules above - impacts ON the cut, whooshes straddling it, risers building in - at about half voice volume. It picks the effect by transition type, and tapping again removes only the auto-placed set (sounds you placed yourself stay). The same pass runs inside Auto-Polish, so a one-tap edit already sounds edited.
A 60-second sound design exercise
Take your last video and add exactly three sounds: an impact on your strongest hard cut, a whoosh under your biggest transition, a riser into your key claim.
Export both versions and watch them back to back. The three-sound cut feels noticeably more produced, and that is three effects placed by rule, not by ear. That is the whole discipline.
Frequently asked questions
Where exactly do I place a whoosh on a transition? Straddle the cut: start the whoosh just before the frames change, peak it as they change, and let it tail off just after. Match its length to the transition - if the move takes about half a second, the whoosh should fill most of that (roughly 400-500 ms). It represents the motion, so it lives across the join, not on one side.
Where does an impact go? Exactly on the cut - the single frame where the picture changes or a title lands. Even 50 ms early reads as sloppy. Impacts suit hard cuts, punch-ins and reveals.
How loud should transition sound effects be? Quiet - around half the volume of your voice, roughly −6 dB relative to speech. Sound effects are felt more than heard; if a viewer consciously notices the whoosh, it is too loud.
Should I put a sound on every cut? No. Sound the cuts that matter - section changes, punch-ins, reveals. In a video cutting every 4-5 seconds, sounding every join turns the mix into a percussion track.
Where do I get whoosh and impact sounds? You don't need a sample-pack subscription. Zella ships 30 royalty-free effects synthesized on-device, and its Auto Sound at Cuts pass places a matched one under every transition automatically. Any editor's stock library (or an AI sound generator) works too - the placement rules matter more than the source.
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