What Is a Cutaway?

A cutaway is a shot of something other than the main action or subject, cut into a scene to add context, cover an edit, or control the pace. If a person is talking on camera and you cut to their hands, the room, or what they are describing, that second shot is a cutaway. You leave the main action, show something else for a beat, and (usually) come back.

It sounds small. It is one of the most useful tools an editor has.

What a cutaway actually does

Most people think of cutaways as decoration, something to look at while a voice keeps going. That is part of it, but the real work happens underneath. A cutaway gives you a place to hide a cut.

Say someone delivers a great line, then rambles for twenty seconds, then says something great again. You want both good parts and none of the middle. Cut the two good lines together and you get an ugly hop in the picture, a jump cut where the head jerks position. Cover that join with a cutaway and the audience never sees the seam. The voice carries through, the picture changes, and the twenty seconds of rambling vanishes without a trace.

That is the quiet superpower. A cutaway lets you shorten reality.

It also controls pace. Hold on a talking head too long and attention drifts. Cut to the thing they are describing and you reset the viewer's eye, buy a little tension, and keep them leaning in. MasterClass describes the cutaway as a way to adjust the pace of the main action and to conceal the deletion of unwanted footage, which is exactly the double duty it pulls every day in a documentary suite.

Where the technique comes from

The cutaway is nearly as old as editing itself. Once filmmakers realized you could splice two pieces of film together and the audience would accept the join, the next discovery was that you did not have to stay on one continuous action. You could leave it, show something related, and the brain would stitch the story back together. Wikipedia's entry on the cutaway defines it plainly as the interruption of a continuously filmed action by inserting a view of something else.

That stitching is the whole game. Lev Kuleshov proved in the 1920s that meaning lives between shots, not just inside them. A face plus a bowl of soup reads as hunger; the same face plus a coffin reads as grief. A cutaway is you, the editor, choosing what the audience thinks about during the gap.

Cutaway vs insert shot

People mix these up constantly, so here is the line. A cutaway shows something outside the main action, a reaction in the crowd, a clock on the wall, a bird outside. An insert shot is a close-up of something already inside the scene, the letter the character is reading, the gun in their hand, the watch they keep checking.

The simplest test: could the thing on screen physically be part of this exact moment? A close-up of the coffee cup the speaker just set down is an insert. A shot of the city skyline while they talk about moving away is a cutaway. Both break up a long take. They just borrow from different places.

When to use one, and when not to

Reach for a cutaway when you need to:

• Hide a cut inside a single speaker's audio so two good lines connect cleanly
• Show what someone is describing instead of just hearing about it
• Reset the viewer's eye during a long stretch of talking
• Cover a stumble, a cough, or a moment where the subject looked off-camera

Now the part people skip. Cutaways can be overused, and a cutaway with nothing behind it is just filler. If you cut to a random B-roll shot of a coffee cup for no reason other than fear of a static frame, the audience feels the cheat. The shot has to earn its place, either by adding information or by carrying the join. When it does neither, leave the talking head alone.

Avoid the cutaway that pulls focus, too. If your subject just said the most important sentence of the interview, do not bury that moment under a busy shot of the parking lot. Let the words land on the face. Save the cutaway for the setup or the wind-down.

A worked example

You are cutting a five-minute founder profile. The founder says, three minutes in, a line about almost shutting the company down. It is the emotional center of the piece. But the take has a problem: between two strong sentences she pauses, looks at the producer, and says 'sorry, can I start that again?' before nailing it.

You want her two best sentences back to back. You select the first sentence, then the clean second sentence, and drop them next to each other. The picture jumps, the 'sorry' apology bleeds out, it looks broken.

So you lay her audio underneath, find a cutaway from the day, her hands on the keyboard, the empty office at dawn, and place it over the join. Now you hear: 'We were two weeks from running out of money,' and then, clean, 'and that is when everything changed.' Over the seam, her hands. The audience never knows there was ever a stumble. That is a cutaway doing real work.

Planning cutaways before you open the editor

Here is the part editors learn the hard way. The cleanest cutaways are the ones you planned for, not the ones you scrambled to find in the timeline. When you log your footage, mark the B-roll and the detail shots and note what they could cover. When you read the transcript, you can see exactly where you are going to need a join, because that is where you are stitching two non-adjacent selects together.

This is the heart of a transcript-first workflow. Instead of scrubbing video for an hour hunting for a place to hide a cut, you read the words, mark the moments you want, and the joins announce themselves. With ScriptCut you highlight the strongest lines straight from the transcript, arrange them into a story, and the spots that need a cutaway are obvious, they are wherever two selects from different parts of the interview meet. You plan the cover in the pre-edit, then export a ready-to-cut timeline to DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, or Final Cut, where you drop the cutaway over the seam. The pre-edit decides where the cutaways go; the NLE is where you finish them. For the longer version of that approach, see our guide on the transcript-to-timeline workflow and how to cut a documentary interview.

Get good at cutaways and a wall of talking-head footage stops being a wall. It becomes raw material you can reshape, tighten, and pace however the story needs. Related reading: what is b-roll and how to edit an interview faster.

Sources

• Cutaway (filmmaking) - Wikipedia
• Cutaway Shots Explained - MasterClass
• Using cutaway shots for film and television - Adobe
• Kuleshov effect - Wikipedia