Offline editing
As offline editing or offline editing is a kind of video editing called at which the cut using a decreased in quality and file size copy is created, rather than using an editing system to control the original material directly, which in the early days of video editing as "Online Edit “Was designated.
The pair of terms “online / offline” comes from the telecommunications terminology and in this usage refers to the direct control of one system by another (online) or the independent operation of a system from a second (offline).
With the advent of non-linear editing systems such as AVID - the first version ready for the market was available in 1989 - the term "offline editing" arose with the changing working method during editing. The non-linear systems were initially (and are still not able to process film material in broadcast quality and in real time in the case of feature films with their comparatively large amounts of data). The editing workflow was therefore divided into two parts: In the first part, the entire film material is copied and scaled down to a resolution that is adapted to the capacity of the hardware used . The cut is finalized in this quality. Since then, this part of the process has been called offline edit or offline cut because, in contrast to the process originally called online edit, it does not access the original material directly, but works separately from it. The degraded quality of this copied material is called offline quality.
In the second part of the editing process, the final offline edit is "recreated" with access to the original material in the highest possible quality. This part has since been called online edit.
This distinction is becoming less and less functional: In the early years of video editing, different software and hardware were used for offline and online editing . With the ever increasing performance of software and hardware, it is now possible to cut in online quality on the same system (e.g. on the AVID) from the outset. Editing systems therefore work increasingly loss-free in online quality. For this new workflow, the conceptual separation between offline and online editing is no longer helpful. It remains useful for all processes that work with the intermediate step of a quality-reduced copy.