About offline editing In offline editing, you edit video using low-quality clips and produce the final version using high-quality clips on a high-end system. Offline editing was developed to save money by editing in a less expensive facility. Although offline editing can be as simple as writing down time points for scenes while watching them on a VCR, it is increasingly done using personal computers and Premiere. Offline editing techniques can be useful even if your computer can handle editing at the quality of your final cut. By batch-capturing video using low-quality settings, you can edit faster, using smaller files. When you digitize video for offline editing, you specify settings that emphasize editing speed over picture quality. In most cases you need only enough quality to identify the correct beginning and ending frames for each scene. When you're ready to create the final cut, you can redigitize the video at the final-quality settings. See Digitizing analog video as DV and Creating a batch list to redigitize project clips. Once you have completed the offline edit in Premiere, you can create a table of scene sequences called an edit decision list, or EDL. You then move the EDL to an edit controller on a high-end system, which applies the sequence worked out in Premiere to the original high-quality clips. In this way, the editing work done on the less expensive workstation is used to create the final cut on the more expensive, higher-quality workstation. If you will be generating an EDL from your edits, be sure that all clips are captured with frame-accurate timecode corresponding exactly to the timecode of the high-quality source video that you will use for the final online edit. If you plan to edit off line using VHS dubs (copies) of the source clips, be sure that in each dub you burn in the timecode--that is, make the timecode visible in a window in the picture. These steps ensure that the EDL you generate is usable when transferred to the online system or edit bay and that your edits will be frame-accurate. See Reading timecode from source video. Capturing and Importing Source Clips > Understanding offline and online editing > About offline editing |