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Non-linear editing system

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For non-linear or non-destructive editing of 2D images, see NLE (disambiguation).


It has been suggested that Non-destructive editing be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed
since June 2015.

A non-linear editing system (NLE) is a video (NLVE) or audio editing (NLAE) digital audio
workstation (DAW) system that performs non-destructive editing on source material. The name is in
contrast to 20th century methods of linear video editing and film editing.

Example of a non-linear video editing studio

Contents
[hide]

1 Linear and non-linear editing


o

1.1 Metadata

1.2 Direct access

1.3 Basic techniques

2 Broadcast workflows and advantages

3 Accessing the material

4 Repartition of editors brands in broadcast industry

5 Domestic usage

6 History
o

6.1 First non-linear editor

6.2 The 1980s

6.3 The 1990s

6.4 DV

6.5 HD

6.6 4K

7 Quality

8 See also

9 References

10 External links

Linear and non-linear editing[edit]


Non-linear editing is the most natural approach when all assets are available as files on video
servers or hard disks, rather than recordings on reels or tapeswhile linear editing is tied to the
need to sequentially view film or hear tape.

Metadata[edit]
When ingesting audio or video feeds, metadata are attached to the clip. Those metadata can be
attached automatically (timecode, localization, take number, name of the clip) or manually (players
names, characters, in sports: red card, goal...).

Direct access[edit]
Non-linear editing enables direct access to any video frame in a digital video clip, without needing to
play or scrub/shuttle through adjacent footage to reach it, as was necessary with historical video
tape linear editing systems. It is now possible to access any frame by entering directly
the timecode or the descriptive metadata. An editor can, for example at the end of the day in
the Olympic Games, ask to retrieve all the clips related to the players who received a gold medal.

Basic techniques[edit]
The NLE method is similar in concept to the "cut and paste" techniques used in film editing or in IT.
However, with the use of non-linear editing systems, the destructive act of cutting of film negatives is
eliminated. It can also be viewed as the audio/video equivalent of word processing, which is why it is
called desktop video editing in the consumer space.[1]

Broadcast workflows and advantages[edit]


Video and audio data are first captured to video servers, other hard disk-based systems, or other
digital storage devices. The data are either direct to disk recording or are imported from another
source (transcoding, digitizing, transfer). Once imported, the source material can be edited on a
computer using application software, any of a wide range of video editing software. For a
comprehensive list of available software, see List of video editing software, whereas Comparison of
video editing software gives more detail of features and functionality.
In non-linear editing, the original source files are not lost or modified during editing. This is one of the
biggest advantages of non-linear editing compared to linear editing.
Professional editing software records the editor's decisions in an edit decision list (EDL) that is
exportable to other editing tools. Many generations and variations of the original source files can
exist without storing many different copies, allowing for very flexible editing. It also makes it easy to
change cuts and undo previous decisions simply by editing the edit decision list (without having to

have the actual film data duplicated). Generation loss is also controlled, due to not having to
repeatedly re-encode the data when different effects are applied.
Compared to the linear method of tape-to-tape editing, non-linear editing offers the flexibility of film
editing, with random access and easy project organization. With the edit decision lists, the editor can
work on low-resolution copies of the video. This makes it possible to edit both standard-definition
broadcast quality and high definition broadcast quality very quickly on desktop computers that may
not have the power to process huge full-quality high-resolution data in real-time.
The costs of editing systems have dropped such that non-linear editing tools are now within the
reach of home users. Some editing software can now be accessed free as web applications; some,
like Cinelerra (focused on the professional market) and Blender3D, can be downloaded as free
software; and some, like Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker orApple Inc.'s iMovie, come included
with the appropriate operating system.

Accessing the material[edit]


The non-linear editing retrieves video media for editing. Because these media exist on the video
server or other mass storage that stores the video feeds in a given codec, the editing system can
use several methods to access the material:

Direct access: the video server records feeds with a codec readable by the editing system,
has an Ethernet connection and allows direct editing. The editor previews material directly on the
server (which it sees as remote storage) and edits directly on the server
without transcoding or transfer. This method is new.

Shared storage: the video server transfers feeds to and from shared storage that is
accessible by all editors. Media in the appropriate codec on the server need onlytransferred. If
recorded with a different codec, media must be transcoded during transfer. In some cases
(depending on material), files on shared storage can be edited even before the transfer is
finished.

Importing: the editor downloads the material and edits it locally. This method can be used
with the previous methods.

Repartition of editors brands in broadcast industry[edit]


According to reports, Avid's Media Composer is still the most-used NLE on prime-time TV
productions, being employed on up to 90 percent of evening broadcast shows.[2]Apple's Final Cut
Pro 7 software is being used by 54.6 percent of the professional editing community.[3] Globally, Avid
Media Composer was once more used by broadcasters, and Final Cut Pro more by domestic users.
This positioning has changed, and many more editing platforms now exist; like the Edius Pro manufactured by Grass Valley - which has a reasonable share, due its capability to do what both
Avid and Final Cut combined.

Domestic usage[edit]
A multimedia computer for non-linear editing of video may have a video capture card to
capture analog video and/or a FireWire connection to capture digital video from a DVcamera, with
its video editing software. Modern web-based editing systems can take video directly from a camera
phone over a GPRS or 3G mobile connection, and editing can take place through a web browser
interface, so, strictly speaking, a computer for video editing does not require any installed hardware
or software beyond a web browser and aninternet connection.

Various editing tasks can then be performed on the imported video before it is exported to
another medium, or MPEG encoded for transfer to a DVD.

History[edit]

This article may need to be rewritten entirely to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards,
as section. You can help. Thediscussion page may contain suggestions. (May 2012)

First non-linear editor[edit]


The first truly non-linear editor, the CMX 600, was introduced in 1971 by CMX Systems, a joint
venture between CBS and Memorex.[4][5] It recorded & played back black-and-white analog video
recorded in "skip-field" mode on modified disk pack drives the size of washing machines. These
were commonly used to store about half an hour of data digitally on mainframe computers of the
time. The 600 had a console with 2 monitors built in. The right monitor, which played the preview
video, was used by the editor to make cuts and edit decisions using a light pen. The editor selected
from options superimposed as text over the preview video. The left monitor was used to display the
edited video. ADigital PDP-11 computer served as a controller for the whole system. Because the
video edited on the 600 was in black and white and in low-resolution "skip-field" mode, the 600 was
suitable only for offline editing.

The 1980s[edit]
Various approximations of non-linear editing systems were built in the '80s using computers
coordinating multiple laser discs, or banks of VCRs. One example of these tape & disc-based
systems was Lucasfilm's EditDroid, which used several laserdiscs of the same raw footage to
simulate random-access editing (a compatible system was developed for sound post-production
by Lucasfilm called SoundDroidone of the earliest digital audio workstations). The LA-based post
house Laser Edit (which later merged with Pacific Video as Laser-Pacific) also had an in-house
system using recordable random-access laserdiscs. The most popular non-linear system was
Ediflex, which used a bank of multiple Sony JVC VCRs for offline editing. Ediflex was introduced in
1983 on the Universal series "Still the Beaver," edited by Herb Dow, A.C.E. By 1985 it was used on
over 80% of filmed network programs. In 1985 Cinedco was awarded the Technical Emmy for
"Design and Implementation of Non-Linear Editing for Filmed Programs. Adrian Ettlinger, Herb Dow
A.C.E., Milt Forman and Andy Maltz shared the award, All were slow, cumbersome, and had
problems with the limited computer horsepower of the time, but the mid-to-late-1980s saw a trend
towards non-linear editing, moving away from film editing on Movieolas and the linear videotape
method (usually employing 3/4" VCRs).[citation needed]
"In 1984 Montage and Editdroid were demonstrated at NAB. Montage used 17 identical copies of a
set of film rushes on domestic Betamax cassettes running under time code and computer control to
provide a simulation of random access editing. Editdroid used analogue videodisks. Like all
nonlinear editing systems, all that was edited was the play listthe set of instructions telling the
equipment how to replay the picture and sound.
The theory was that with so many copies of the rushes, there could always be one machine cued up
to replay the next shot in real time. Changing the play list could be done easily, and the results seen
immediately. The practice wasnt quite so simple and the first Montage was not a great success,
although Stanley Kubrick used it for Full Metal Jacket
Montage was reincarnated as Montage II in 1987, and Montage III appeared at NAB in 1991, using
digital disk technology, which should prove to be considerably less cumbersome than the Betamax
system.
Although Montage has some success with feature films, it was Ediflex, using a similar principle but
with multiple VHS machines, which captured most of the television market in the US (Dallas,

Dynasty, Falcon Crest etc.). In 1989 they introduced a PAL version and Yorkshire TV became the
first British television company to use nonlinear methods in a routine way." Richard
Seel. http://www.articles.adsoft.org/

The 1990s[edit]
The term "nonlinear editing" or "non-linear editing" was formalized in 1991 with the publication of
Michael Rubin's Nonlinear: A Guide to Digital Film and Video Editing (Triad, 1991)which
popularized this terminology over other language common at the time, including "real time" editing,
"random-access" or "RA" editing, "virtual" editing, "electronic film" editing, and so on. The handbook
has remained in print since 1991, currently in its 4th edition (Triad, 2000) [6]
Computer processing advanced sufficiently by the end of the '80s to enable true digital imagery, and
has progressed today to provide this capability in personal desktop computers.
An example of computing power progressing to make non-linear editing possible was demonstrated
in the first all-digital non-linear editing system, the "Harry" effects compositing system manufactured
by Quantel in 1985. Although it was more of a video effects system, it had some non-linear editing
capabilities. Most importantly, it could record (and apply effects to) 80 seconds (due to hard disk
space limitations) of broadcast-quality uncompressed digital video encoded in 8-bit CCIR 601 format
on its built-in hard disk array.
Non-linear editing with computers as it is known today was first introduced by Editing Machines
Corp. in 1989 with the EMC2 editor, a PC-based non-linear off-line editing system that utilized
magneto-optical disks for storage and playback of video, using half-screen-resolution video at 15
frames per second. A couple of weeks later that same year, Avidintroduced the Avid/1, the first in the
line of their Media Composer systems. It was based on the Apple Macintosh computer platform
(Macintosh II systems were used) with special hardware and software developed and installed by
Avid. The Avid/1 was not the first system to introduce modern concepts in non-linear editing such as
timeline editing and clip binsboth of those were pioneered in Lucasfilm's EditDroid in the early
1980s.
The video quality of the Avid/1 (and later Media Composer systems from the late 1980s) was
somewhat low (about VHS quality), due to the use of a very early version of aMotion JPEG (MJPEG) codec. it was sufficient, however, to provide a versatile system for offline editing, to
revolutionize video and film editing. The first long-form documentary so edited was the HBO
program Earth and the American Dream, which won a National Primetime Emmy Award for Editing in
1993. Avid quickly became the dominant NLE platform.
The NewTek Video Toaster Flyer for the Amiga included non-linear editing capabilities in addition to
processing live video signals. The Flyer used hard drives to store video clips and audio, and
supported complex scripted playback. The Flyer provided simultaneous dual-channel playback,
which let the Toaster's Video switcher perform transitions and other effects on Video clips without
additional rendering. The Flyer portion of the Video Toaster/Flyer combination was a complete
computer of its own, having its ownmicroprocessor and embedded software. Its hardware included
three embedded SCSI controllers. Two of these SCSI buses were used to store video data, and the
third to store audio. The Flyer used a proprietary Wavelet compression algorithm known as VTASC,
which was well regarded at the time for offering better visual quality than comparableMotion
JPEG based non-linear editing systems.
Until 1993, the Avid Media Composer was most often used for editing commercials or other small
content/high value projects. This was primarily because the purchase cost of the system was very
high, especially in comparison to the offline tape-based systems that were then in general use. Hard
disk storage was also expensive enough to be a limiting factor on the quality of footage that most
editors could work with and/or the amount of material that could be held digitised at any one time. In
editing facilities rented by the hour or the day, a production's digitised rushes would usually be
deleted at the end of the hire, so that the full amount of hard disk storage was available to the next

client. Nonetheless, as all editing was being done at an offline video quality, it was possible to edit
broadcast documentaries on as little as 3 gigabytes of hard drive storage. The end product of the
offline non-linear editing process was a frame-accurate Edit Decision List ('EDL') that was output to a
floppy disk and taken, together with the source tapes (aka 'the rushes'), to an online quality tape
editing suite. The EDL was then read into an edit controller and used to 'auto-conform' a replica of
the offline edit, playing portions of the source tapes back at full video quality and recording them to a
master tape as per the exact edit points of the EDL.
Up until 1992, the Apple Macintosh computers could access only 50 gigabytes of storage at once. In
1992, this limitation was overcome by a group of industry experts led by Rick Eye a Digital Video
R&D team at the Disney Channel. By February 1993, this team had integrated a long-form system
that let the Avid Media Composer Apple Macintosh access over seven terabytes of digital video data.
With instant access to the shot footage of an entire movie, long form non-linear editing (Motion
Picture Editing) was now possible. The system made its debut at the NAB conference in 1993, in the
booths of the three primary sub-system manufacturers, Avid, Silicon Graphics and Sony. Within a
year, thousands of these systems, using Avid's Film Composer software (which handled the complex
conversions between the offline video frame rates and the 24 fps of film), or the ever more
sophisticated Media Composer, had replaced a century of 35 mm film editing equipment in major
motion picture studios and TV stations worldwide, making Avid the undisputed leader in "off-line"
non-linear editing systems for over a decade.[7]
Although M-JPEG became the standard codec for NLE during the early 1990s, it had drawbacks. Its
high computational requirements ruled out software implementations, leading to the extra cost and
complexity of hardware compression/playback cards. More importantly, the traditional
tape workflow had involved editing from tape, often in a rented facility. When the editor left the edit
suite, they could take their confidential video tapes with them. But the M-JPEG data rate was too
high for systems like Avid on the Mac andLightworks on PC to store the video on removable storage,
so these used fixed hard disks instead. The tape paradigm of keeping your (confidential) content
with you was not possible with these fixed disks. Editing machines were often rented from facilities
houses on a per-hour basis, and some productions chose to delete their material after each edit
session, and then recapture it the next day to guarantee security of their content. [citation needed] In addition,
each NLE system had storage limited by its hard disk capacity.
These issues were addressed by a small UK company, Eidos plc. Eidos chose the new ARM-based
computers from the UK and implemented an editing system, launched in Europe in 1990 at
the International Broadcasting Convention. Because it implemented its own compression software
designed specifically for non-linear editing, the Eidos system had no requirement for JPEG hardware
and was cheap to produce. The software could decode multiple video and audio streams at once for
real-time effects at no extra cost. But most significantly, for the first time, it supported unlimited
cheap removable storage. The Eidos Edit 1, Edit 2, and later Optima systems let the editor
use any Eidos system, rather than being tied down to a particular one, and still keep his data secure.
The Optima software editing system was closely tied to Acorn hardware, so when Acorn stopped
manufacturing the Risc PC in the late 1990s, Eidos discontinued the Optima system.
In the early 1990s, a small American company called Data Translation took what it knew about
coding and decoding pictures for the US military and large corporate clients and spent $12 million
developing a desktop editor based on its proprietary compression algorithms and off-the-shelf parts.
Their aim was to 'democratize' the desktop and take some of Avid's market. In August 1993, Media
100 entered the market, providing would-be editors with a low-cost, high-quality platform.
Around the same period, two other competitors provided non-linear systems that required special
hardwaretypically cards added to the computer system. Fast Video Machine was a PC-based
system that first came out as an offline system, and later became more online editing capable. Immix
Video Cube was also a contender for media production companies. The Immix Video Cube had a
control surface with faders to allow mixing and shuttle controls without the purchase of third-party
controllers. Data Translation's Media 100 came with three different JPEG codecs for different types

of graphics of video and many resolutions. The Media 100 system kept increasing its maximum
video resolution via software upgrades rather than hardware. This was because the Media 100 cards
had enough processing power support resolutions as high as Avid systems at the upper end of the
Avid product line. Cards at the time had embedded dedicated CPUs (for example a Motorola 68000
processor), which were as powerful as the processors inside the Macintosh systems that hosted the
application. These other companies caused tremendous downward market pressure on Avid. Avid
was forced to continually offer lower-priced systems to compete with the Media 100 and other
systems.
Inspired by the success of Media 100, members of the Premiere development team left Adobe to
start a project called "Keygrip" for Macromedia. Difficulty raising support and money for development
led the team to take their non-linear editor to the NAB conference. After various companies made
offers, Keygrip was purchased by Apple as Steve Jobs wanted a product to compete with Adobe
Premiere in the desktop video market. At around the same time, Avidnow with Windows versions
of its editing softwarewas considering abandoning the Macintosh platform. Apple released Final
Cut Pro in 1999, and despite not being taken seriously at first by professionals, it has evolved into a
serious competitor to entry level's Avid's systems.

DV[edit]
Another leap came in the late 1990s with the launch of DV-based video formats for consumer and
professional use. With DV came IEEE 1394 (FireWire/iLink), a simple and inexpensive way of
getting video into and out of computers. Users no longer had to convert video from analog to digital
it was recorded as digital to start withand FireWire offered a straightforward way to transfer
video data without additional hardware or compression. With this innovation, editing became a more
realistic proposition for standard computers with software-only packages. It enabled real desktop
editing producing high-quality results at a fraction of the cost of other systems.

HD[edit]
In early 2000, the introduction of highly compressed HD formats such as HDV has continued this
trend, making it possible to edit HD material on a standard computer running a software-only editing
application.
Avid is still considered the industry standard, with the majority of major feature films, television
programs, and commercials created with its NLE systems.[8] Final Cut Pro received a Technology &
Engineering Emmy Award in 2002 and continues to develop a following.
Avid has held on to its market-leading position in the advent of cheaper software packages,
notably Adobe Premiere in 1992 and Final Cut Pro in 1999. These three competing products by
Avid, Adobe, and Apple are the foremost NLEs, often referred to as the A-Team.[9] With advances in
raw computer processing power, new products have appeared including NewTek's software
application SpeedEdit.
Since 2000, many personal computers include basic non-linear video editing software free of charge.
This is the case of Apple iMovie for the Macintosh platform, various open source programs
like Kdenlive and PiTiVi for the Linux platform, and Windows Movie Maker for the Windows platform.
This phenomenon has brought low-cost non-linear editing to consumers.

4K[edit]
As of 2014, 4K Video in NLE is fairly new, but it is being used in the creation of many movies
throughout the world, due to the increased use of advanced 4K cameras such as theRed
Camera. Avid Media Composer, Apple's Final Cut Pro X, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere,
and Edius support 4K video editing.

Quality[edit]

At one time, a primary concern with non-linear editing had been picture and sound quality. Storage
limitations at the time required that all material undergo lossy compressiontechniques to reduce the
amount of memory occupied.
Improvements in compression techniques and disk storage capacity have mitigated these concerns,
and the migration to High Definition video and audio has virtually removed this concern completely.
Most professional NLEs are also able to edit uncompressed video with the appropriate hardware.

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