6 ideas
An ideal cut satisfies six criteria, ranked and weighted: emotion (51%), story (23%), rhythm (10%), eye-trace (7%), two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%), and three-dimensional continuity of space (4%). When a cut cannot satisfy all six, the editor gives up criteria from the bottom of the list first, because an audience forgives a spatial mismatch it never consciously registers but not a break in emotional truth.
What an audience carries away from a film is how it felt, not whether an actor's hand was in the same position across a cut. A cut that is technically seamless but emotionally false fails. A cut with visible continuity errors that lands the right feeling at the right moment succeeds, because viewers do not notice errors when they are emotionally engaged.
People tend to blink at the moment an idea is completed or their attention shifts, so a blink marks the boundary between one thought and the next. A good cut falls at the same point where a viewer would naturally blink, separating and punctuating ideas the way the mind already does. Editing then works as a rhythm matched to thinking rather than an arbitrary interruption of images.
An instantaneous jump to a different time and place should be jarring, since it has no equivalent in continuous waking perception. Audiences accept it because dreams and the flow of thought already move by discontinuous leaps, juxtaposition, and ellipsis. Cinema's grammar borrows from inner experience, not from external reality.
The editor deliberately stays away from the set so as to judge footage only by what is on screen. That knowledge distorts judgment, because the audience will have none of it. Keeping this ignorance lets the editor stand in for the first-time viewer.
Physically winding through reels of film to find a shot forced editors to view unrelated footage along the way, and this often surfaced unexpected, better material. Digital random access delivers exactly what was asked for and removes this productive detour. Editors working digitally must deliberately rebuild the habit of reviewing broadly rather than retrieving narrowly.