I am currently working on award acceptance speeches that need to be edited for time and also to clean up the pauses and "umms". The speeches were shot with one camera with no re-framing as the speaker basically just started giving "thank you's" and telling stories with no pause. With this being an acceptance speech there really isn't anything that I can use for b-roll or a cut away. What is the best transition to use where there are jump cuts? I have tried both a cross dissolve and a quick dip to white transition. They both look okay but I want to make sure I am using the most professional technique for this project. Thanks for any suggestions.

Leon

Can you use still pictures that are topic related to what he is speaking about?

Not really, I have a few photos of the speakers but they are being used for an intro and aren't specific to their speeches. The speakers are telling 1 or 2 stories and giving thanks to various people who have helped them.

any crowd cut aways ?

Sometimes you just have to cross-fade with the bad taken out. Another idea is to do a jump-cut with the bad taken out and digitally zoom in just before the cut or just after the cut (resize and reframe) so it looks like a camera change.

Time to make lemonade!

in addition to digital zoom and reframing, sometimes you can get away with flopping the image to look like a second camera from the other side.

I've dealt with this a bunch and my favs are the 8 frame dissolve (used to see it on all the news shows like 60 Minutes and Dateline) and the sparingly-used dip to black dissolve. I have also used the digital zoom but that really depends on the delivery format. If you're scaling down, works great. Otherwise...not really.
As Chris mentioned, crowds would be the ideal on this situation.

Or, if it's a lockdown and the speaker is pretty much in the same place, you can do a quick "morph" effect.

Sometimes it works like magic...sometimes it looks like a bad sci-fi movie.

I usually scale up and scale down during cuts and reposition them around, sometimes off center to the left in the middle or anywhere that looks best.

That effect gives you like you were shooting with 2 camera's with wide shots showing the head and a little bit of the shoulder and tight shots just showing the head.

I like the Nattress film flash transition....about a 5 frame one. It's similar to a dip to white, but a little
different....I think it gives a good look. I've also used the flop video filter as mentioned (but it doesn't work
if there are any signs or things like that in the background as the words then are reversed and a dead giveaway). The digital zoom in the NLE is a good idea as well as long as you don't zoom in too far.
For a commercial, I've used the standard 'freeze the video, make it go black and white....and sometimes even slid a new background behind the speaker' move, but that probably doesn't work in a award acceptance speech.