Sound, edit and finish, hands on

Member lesson

Stitching, crossfades and cuts with ffmpeg

Lesson 6 of 8 in Sound, edit and finish, hands on.

Checked against the makers' documentation on 25 September 2026.

Lesson

ffmpeg joins clips two ways. The concat demuxer reads a text file listing the clips and copies them end to end without re-encoding, which takes a fraction of a second, but ffmpeg's own wiki says all files must have the same streams, codecs and time base. Filters (the concat filter, or xfade for crossfades) decode everything and encode once more, which is slower and forgiving. Generated clips rarely match. Veo's 720p comes at 1280 by 720 with sound, Wan's 5B model makes 1280 by 704 with none, and a folder of clips from three services can easily hold three sizes, two frame rates and a silent track, so look before you join.

01020304050607080910each overlap: 12 frames = 0.5 soffset = film so far − 0.5material 34.5 s → film 30.0 sconform first: 1920 × 1080 · 24 fps · 48 khz stereomixed clips must match before they can fade
Ten shots with nine half-second crossfades make a thirty-second film from 34.5 seconds of material; each crossfade's offset is the film so far minus half a second, and every clip is conformed to 1920 by 1080 at 24 fps first.
An ink drawing of two strips of film crossing on a splicing block, their pictures blending into a swirl of colour where they overlap.
A crossfade is a physical overlap: two strips of film mixing where they meet.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “ffmpeg joining files from a list without re-encoding. Fast, and safe only for identical clips.”

    • Output ownership
    • Concat demuxer
    • SynthID
    • Lip sync
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “-c copy, which moves the compressed data across untouched. It can only start cleanly on a keyframe.”

    • Faststart
    • Voiceover
    • Stream copy
    • Model ID
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A frame stored whole. The frames after it are stored as changes and cannot stand alone.”

    • Concat demuxer
    • Keyframe
    • Stream copy
    • Crossfade offset

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