online or offline editing for upcoming documentary

gumonstro

gumonstro

Well-known member
I think I´ll be hired to edit a 52´doc in november. Seven days of shootings with 2 cameras, probably. The last day will have 4 cameras shooting 4 different situations. I´ll have tons of tapes to work with, all HDV 1080i.

My NLE is not SO powerful, but I´m prepared to make a huge upgrade. Anyway, what I ask myself is: should I do an offline editing, because the project can´t wait too much to be released, or should I go online?

I THINK there´s money for an online editing.

What do you guys suggest me? What are the pros and cons of online and offline in this case?
 
Well, you could convert the captured HDV footage to DV for the edit and then before final render replace it with the HDV source. If you have a lower-spec system, then this would yield better performance compared to editing the HDV file, or even using the cineform intermediary (as well as disc space). It could be more headache than it's worth tho.

On the other hand, a newer, more capable computer can handle HDV (or the cineform intermediate) in realtime, thus saving you the extra steps of editing with DV proxies and replacing them with the HDV source at the end.
 
If you're shooting HDV, and want the BEST quality possible;
Capture as uncompressed HD from the analog outs to a BMD card. Failing budget to build that machine/RAID, etc, capture as HDV, convert to CineForm immediately. If your system is slow, create proxies/offlines from the Cineform, edit, and then online it with the CineForm. CineForm is excellent as online/master output format, even for going to HDCAM
 
It makes sense if you think of online and offline editing as two stages of editing.

In the offline stage of editing, you are doing the actual editing- cuts and dissolves. You may put in some rough effects (soundFX, video effects, titles) for visualizing the final product.
In the online stage, you add the final touches to the piece. An online editing system may be a higher performance machine, so you don't need to wait on rendering as much.
During online editing, you may also re-capture the video at a higher quality.


This is compared to editing something in a single stage... i.e. capture DV, do everything on a single system, no re-capturing or moving to another editing system.
The advantage of online/offline can be:
A- Editing on a cheap editing system will save money. Then finish the edit on a more expensive system, which is either faster or gives higher quality output (i.e. no compression).
B- Capturing at lower resolution or quality allows much more storage space.
 
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