Online editing
As online editing or on-line cut was originally a type of video editing refer to operations of the cutting process was controlled by a computer or appropriate to video system. The meaning has fundamentally changed with the development of cutting technology.
Change of concept
The term “online” comes from telecommunications terminology and in this context means “under the control of another system”. Online editing systems such as the SONY BVE-9000 were able to control various video recorders using commands such as “fast forward”, “copy”, “play” and in this way create a linear cut from different video and audio sources.
With the advent of non-linear editing systems such as AVID - the first version ready for the market was available in 1989 - the meaning of online editing changed with the changing way of working 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 takes into account 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 control 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. Only this part has been called online edit since then.
However, this distinction is becoming less and less important, and the meaning of "online editing" is changing again: 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 one and the same system (e.g. on the AVID) from the outset. In this case, online editing has since been synonymous with "cutting in online quality".