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"YouTube Shorts" has increased my appreciation for good video editing

But not because these "shorts" are really well edited. Actually, the exact opposite.

You see, after YouTube introduced their "shorts" feature (which is still absolutely horrendous and incomprehensible, and completely unnecessary and unneeded), many people have for some reason become enamored with it and uploaded millions and millions of videos in this format.

One particular trend has raised its ugly head in later years (and at an ever-increasing rate) with these "shorts": People taking longer clips of something, like a movie, TV series, anime series or whatever, and then they themselves cutting bits and pieces off of them in order to make them much shorter (usually under a minute long).

Sure, they might have good intentions at heart: Trying to retain the core essence of the scene in question, without cutting out anything important.

Problem is: As a result of these constant micro-cuts (that oftentimes cut out just a second or two of the original), the end result is a jumbled mess: A scene that randomly (and usually quite clearly) jumps forward, skipping some natural progression in the original scene from one tidbit to the next. And most of these clips have a dozen or even several dozens of such micro-cuts.

This often makes the clip annoying to watch. This even when I have never seen the original clip, but I can clearly see that the "short" has made several small cuts to it, as what's happening doesn't flow naturally and instead has these conspicuous jumps in what's happening, as if something in-between had been cut out. Which of course it has been.

This has actually, and perhaps ironically, increased my awareness and appreciation of good video editing: When qualified experienced video editors construct a longer narrative from large amounts of raw source material, they really know how to make it feel fluent and contiguous, without awkward and annoying "jumps" from one thing to another.

A form of mastery that many of these "YouTube Shorts" videos go their way to completely destroy. 

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