What's the difference between "online" and "offline" editing ?

[stuu]

I know it doesn't really relate to 001, but was just curious.

[sutroman]

I've only heard these terms in reference to film and video editing, but I suppose you could relate them to audio editing as well....

a short answer:
In film/video, an offline edit is essentially a rough cut, usually with media taken in at low res to allow a lot of footage to be loaded and available. It's in the offline session where most of the "creative" decisions are made; shots, cuts, disolves, fades, etc...

An online session is more or less a finalizing session. For video, the footage is re digitized at the highest possible resolution and the cut is reconstructed bassed on the timecode from the offline edit.

There's a lot more to it than that, but that should give you an idea.

[Park Seward]

The term was used to describe a session where the machines were not connected to the editor. It was where you used one or two machines to make edits or erasing parts of the material or pulling up material. When all the reels were ready, the VTRs were put "on-line", i.e. connected to the editor and switcher.

Since most stuff is cut with non-linear editors today, the "off-line" is usually meant to describe a low resoultiuon session like has been described. The low resolution (high compression ratio) is used to get the most amount of footage on to the disk drives. After the creative decisions are made, the footage is automatically de-digitized and then conformed to the edit decition list. Less and less material is brought to a linear suite to finish since the non-linear workstations offer such good (uncompressed) quality.

[stuu]

thanks guys

[Michael Cottrell]

Offline editing in reference to Digital Video Editing means that you use low resolution digital video clips during the editing phase of prodution rather than full resolution video clips. This is speeds up processing time considerably because using full resolution clips slow many computers down significantly.

Once the editing phase is complete the offline clips are recaptured using the in and out settings of the production sequence and then output to the destination media at full resolution. [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]