Offline editing
Offline editing is the creative storytelling stage of
Typically, during the Offline editing part of the
Modern offline
The term
History
From film to tape
The second option for video editing was to use two tape machines, one playing back the original tapes, and the other recording that playback. The original tapes were pre-rolled, manually cued to a few seconds prior to the start of a shot on the player, while the recorder was set to record. Each machine was rolled forward simultaneously, and a punch in recording, similar to
This was the way things were for television shows shot on tape for the first 15 years. Even such fast-paced shows as Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In continued to use the razor blade technique.
New technological developments
Three developments of the late sixties and early seventies revolutionized video editing, and made it possible for television to have its own version of the film workprint/conform process.
Time code
The first was the invention of
Cheaper video recorders
Although video technology had the potential to be cheaper since it doesn't have the costs of film stock and have to go through the development process respectively, the quality of early video recording technology in the 1950s and even into the mid 1960s was often far too low to be taken seriously against the aesthetical look, familiarity and relative ease of editing of
Professionally, early video cameras were designated mostly for studio use, as up until the mid-1980s, when the camera unit and recorder unit merged as a camcorder (CAMera-reCORDER) as their bulky size made them far too big and bulky to be used outside against the smaller and more practical film camera.
For example, British sitcom Only Fools and Horses used videotape for internal scenes, but used film stock for external scenes for lighting reasons – it was difficult with tube sensors to get a stable, quality image without them needing a lot of lighting.
The second development was cheaper video recorders. Though not suitable for broadcast use directly, these provided a way to make a copy of the master, with its time code visibly inserted into a small box or 'time code window' in the picture. This tape could then be played in an office or at home on a video recorder costing only as much as a used car. The editor would note down the numbers of the shots and decide the order. They might simply write them in a list, or they might dub from one of these small machines to another to create a rough cut edit, and note the necessary frame numbers by watching this tape.
Exact editing
Though both of these developments helped greatly, effectively creating the offline editing method, they didn't solve the problem of precisely controlling the video recorder for frame accurate editing. That required precise control of the tape transport mechanism, using a dedicated edit controller that could read the time code and perform an edit exactly on cue.
That innovation came about as a result of research conducted by
Though recording to computer disc pack and this first attempt at non-linear editing on video was abandoned as too expensive, the rest of the hardware was recycled into the offline/online edit process that remained dominant in television production for the next 20 years or more.
Although tape formats changed from open reels to
See also
- Direct to disk recording
- DTE (direct to edit)
- Non-destructive editing
- Tapeless camcorder
- Video server