Online, Offline, etc
 

What is Online editing and Offline editing? All I've been used to is capturing, editing, then outputting.

Online and offline now days does not really matter. But back in the day... It was:

Online: Editing footage from lower quality to higher quality
Offline: Low quality editing

Online: Creating the final cut from a rough cut
Offline: Creating a roughcut.

It can of course be a mixture of the above, i.e you have done an offline rough cut in low resolution, and then you will online it to do the final cut at a higher resolution.

You might for instance wish to capture your footage in at a lower resolution (i.e. to save on disk space) - offline, and then once you have finished editing, capture the footage in at a higher resolution, on an edit suite that has a lot of disk space - Online.

I hope that explains it a little...

Riley,

Back in the "good old days" computers just didn't have the "horsepower" for quality video editing. But the nonlinear capabilities of computers were so compelling that "off line" low quality edits were first made in a computer. After all the editorial decisions were made, "on line" edits were made using multiple video recorders. A computer was used to control the recorders to make frame accurate edits.

Today, inexpensive computers are plenty powerful, and disk space is plenty cheap, there's hardly a reason for "off line".

If you're working with non-DV formats than online can still make sense (betaSP, DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, anything HD, digibeta, etc.). It may not make sense to own a non-DV deck when you could rent an online suite with one of those decks. Digibeta decks for example are really expensive and it makes loads of sense to do an offline edit on a system without the deck.