Off-Line and On-Line Editing
SMPTE time code also makes on-line and off-line editing practical and economical. A top of the line, full-blown editing suite can easily cost over $1 million to build, while an editing suite using a smaller format might cost less than a quarter of that. The rental fees of such suites will reflect the difference in costs. So it's going to cost a lot more (five or six times as much) to do all your work in the expensive suite than if you could do most of your work in the less expensive suite and spend only a little time in the high-end suite. This is what on-line and off-line editing lets you do. To begin with, when you first record your show on high-quality tape, you also record it on small-format tape and lay down the same time codes on the two tapes.
Off-Line Editing
During this phase you put your high-quality tape in a storage vault and take your small-format tape to its editing suite and start developing your editing script by viewing the tape and selecting the order and edit points of the video segments you wish to join. As you develop the script, you also edit the tape. This will be your work print. Developing your editing script and work print is the most time-consuming part of the editing process. You don't really care about the quality of the tape because no one else is going to see it. Its primary purpose is to allow you to see how the edits fit together so that you can finalize your editing script. Putting together your editing script and your small-format work print that no one else is going to see is called off-line editing.
On-Line Editing
Putting together the large-format final tape is called on-line editing. After you finish the work print and the editing script, you retrieve your high-quality tape from the vault and go to the editing suite. The final, high-quality tape is easy to put together because during off-line editing you determined the specific end points and order of every edit. Since the time code numbers are the same for both tapes, you can simply use your final editing script numbers to edit on-line.
Off-line editing.