Offline editing is the creative storytelling stage of film making and television production where the structure, mood, pacing and story of the final show are defined. Many versions and revisions are presented and considered at this stage until the edit gets to a stage known as picture lock. This is when the process then moves on to the next stages of post production known as online editing, colour grading and audio mixing.
Typically, during the Offline editing part of the post-production process, all the original camera footage (often tens or hundreds of hours) is digitized into a Non-Linear Editing System as a low resolution duplicate. The editor and director are then free to work with all the footage to create the final cut. Editing the copy allows multiple story and creative possibilities to be explored without affecting the camera original film stock or video tape. Once the project has been completely offline edited, the low resolution footage is replaced with the original high resolution media, or "brought online."
Modern offline video editing is conducted using specialized computer hardware and video editing software known as a non-linear editing (NLE) suite, such as Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Sony Vegas, Lightworks and VideoPad. The availability of more powerful digital editing systems has made the offline editing workflow process much quicker than the previous method of time-consuming (video tape to tape) linear video editing.
The term offline originated in the computing and telecommunications industries, meaning "not under the direct control of another device" (automation).