Match cut
A cut where the shape, motion, or action of one shot lines up with the next, so two scenes feel welded together.
See it
What it is
A match cut is a plain hard cut that happens to be disguised: the outgoing frame and the incoming frame share a shape, a direction of movement, a color mass, or an action, so your eye glides across the edit instead of noticing it. The textbook example is Kubrick's '2001', where a thrown bone cuts to an orbiting satellite. 'Lawrence of Arabia' blows out a match and cuts to sunrise over the desert, which is where a lot of people first feel the trick without naming it.
Use it to compress time or jump locations without a transition effect: a coffee cup on a desk becomes a coffee cup in a cafe, a spinning wheel becomes a spinning fan, a hand reaching left continues reaching left in a new room. In product and brand videos it is the cheapest way to make a montage feel authored rather than assembled.
Gotcha: a match cut is meaning, not just geometry. If the two shots have nothing to say to each other, lining up their circles reads as a clever screensaver. It also has to be exact: matching size, screen position, and motion speed across the cut is the work, and being 15 px or three frames off is what turns 'seamless' into 'sloppy'. Related but different: cut on action hides a cut inside one continuous movement, usually within a scene.
Ask AI for it
Build a match cut between these two shots: find the frame where a dominant shape or movement in shot A aligns with one in shot B, scale and reposition so the two forms sit in the same screen position and size, match the direction and speed of movement across the cut, then hard cut on the frame of peak alignment. No dissolve, no morph, no transition plugin.