Dissolves: The out-of-fashion film trick that makes 'The Holdovers' so affecting

The "trick" being discussed is the dissolve (aka cross-fade). The article covers this form of scene transition solely from a story telling and aesthetic viewpoint but the technical craft of dissolves is also interesting because there are many different types. Simple dissolves have a constant linear velocity to the alpha blend but in S-curve dissolves the velocity changes with parameters sometimes called ease-in and ease-out. In sophisticated editing software these curves can be controlled with various types of splines. Although the rate is changing, even relatively short S-curve dissolves often feel subjectively smoother to viewers than linear dissolves because more of the duration is dedicated to the beginning and ending phases which tend to be more visually subtle.

In addition to varying velocity dynamics there are many other interesting and useful types of dissolves such as alpha blended wipes, luma fades, strobes, holds, black/white dips, flash fades and a variety of temporal effects. How an editor chooses to deploy these tools can either make them feature elements or merely subtle tonal flavors.

In the early days of non-linear video editing tools there was more development put into creative transitions but recently editing tools tend to offer only a few dozen canned transitions. This requires editors to use separate visual effects software to achieve more sophisticated or subtle transitions. This inconvenience is one reason such effects are less common outside high-end productions although another driver is that the insufficient bandwidth often dedicated to streaming compression tends to degrade any type of visually subtle transition into a macro-block mess. This is especially unfortunate now that higher dynamic range, bit depths and frame rates are widely available to visual story tellers.

Dissolves, like so many other touches, were spot on. He didn't just set it in the 1970's but made it feel like a film from that time. And it works. My daughter saw it at her college and wrote, "Why does no one talk about this film?!" She didn't realize that it was just released.

But what I admired more about this film, besides the impeccable acting and flawless script, was the way Payne hinted at a specific trope and then rug-pulled it away, sometimes dramatically.

For me: film of the year.

This sounds like a marvellous Christmas film, so naturally the UK release date is in January.

No subscription yet so I haven’t read the article. The dissolves were excellent in this film tho. But overall the slower pace and time with little moments is what made it so good for me - to stop and have time for a slow (but so so good) film like this is what was perfect.

“Out of fashion” aka “The heavy hand of George Lucas can ruin most every thing”

Imho

Are there any examples of the dissolves in the trailer or elsewhere?

I saw a fade in at 1:08 in the trailer, but I’m not sure if that qualifies as dissolve.

The trailer looked so bad to me