Why offline?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Thomas Morter-Laing] “Ok, so this is probably another stupid one from me, but what is the function in FCP for making offline things actually for? I mean, doesnt that mean you lose the source, hence the ability to do anything with clip in the timeline?”

Conserving drive space mostly. You have a documentary like the ones we work on here with 200+ hours of raw material. You’re running out of drive space, you take some material offline. Can always recapture it later if needed.

That’s just one way, there’s plenty more ways to use Make Offline.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.

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[Shane Ross]

That is how you delete the media on inside FCP, so that it knows it is offline. If you do it in the Finder, FCP goes “HEY! This footage! Where did it go??!! Aaaaaahh!”

If you MAKE OFFLINE in FCP, it says “OK, so I am throwing that out…”

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Thomas Morter-laing]

Cool, so what can and cant u do with offline media? I mean presumably u can’t stretch it out, cos the end isn’t there?
Also I’m assuming it’s at this point timecodes are important? (eg if u haveto recapture).

😀
Tom Morter-Laing
Certified Apple Product Proffessional, 2010
Degree; TV Production

iMac 27″ intel i7 2.93GHz, 12GB RAM, ATI HD5750 [1GB GDDR5], 2TB Int. SATA with 2TB External HDD; (FW800).

[Shane Ross]

[Thomas Morter-Laing] “Cool, so what can and cant u do with offline media? I mean presumably u can’t stretch it out, cos the end isn’t there?”

Offline media is just that. OFFLINE. Gone…not there. The QT movies are not on the system, just the clips in the project are. So there is nothing to do because there is nothing to do anything with.

Now, are you getting confused between OFFLINE media and an OFFLINE CODEC? The OFFLINE/ONLINE workflow? That’s very different. OFFLINE in that respect means media that is of low quality…not full resolution.

[Thomas Morter-Laing] “Also I’m assuming it’s at this point timecodes are important? (eg if u haveto recapture).”

EXACTLY. If timecode is wrong, then you can’t recapture and rebuild your cut, or capture at higher quality.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Thomas Morter-laing]

Yes there may be some confusion there- thanks a lot! So would an appropriate workflow be to use an offline codec (which are??) then recapture in a high qual codec for the final export?

😀
Tom Morter-Laing
Certified Apple Product Proffessional, 2010
Degree; TV Production

iMac 27″ intel i7 2.93GHz, 12GB RAM, ATI HD5750 [1GB GDDR5], 2TB Int. SATA with 2TB External HDD; (FW800).

[Michael Sacci]

Unless you are working with a ton of footage it is normally a step that most projects don’t need.

[Shane Ross]

Perfectly acceptable workflow. Prettymuch how things were always done 5 years and earlier. The concept of working full res don start to finish is a relatively new concept.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[David Johnson]

I’ll just add that, when media is made offline inside FCP (as opposed to deleting in Finder, which as Walter said, is generally a bad idea), FCP gives you the option of deleting the media from the drive or leaving it there.

Another reason one might leave media on the drive and disconnect it inside FCP is to replace media (still images, mograph versions, one take with a different take, etc.). However, if this is done with video or audio that’s already used in a timeline, it only works well if both the media being replaced and the replacement are the exact same length. I’m not necessarily suggesting using this method … it sometimes comes in handy for me, but these kinds of things can also be dangerous if you don’t fully understand what is happening and the limitations/requirements.

[Mark Suszko]

As a Certified Olde Farte from the 80’s, let me give you a historic context for the term “offline editing”.

Back in those days of wooden ships and iron men, when puppies were the oldest animals on the earth, we had a two-step video editing process as a means of cost control.

The big main editing suite was called the “online suite”, and was where you added “fancy” effects like dissolves and wipes, that, in those linear tape editing days, required three tape machines to be controlled in synch, running together, just to get two streams or “lines” of video to go thru a switcher, where your dissolves or wipes or character generation were laid in, in real time. You had to A/B roll footage, which meant getting the A roll of tape and the B roll of tape running in perfect synch, then mixing their signals onto the Master recorder as all three rolled along. (Think of western movies where the train robbers jump from roof to roof of the moving train cars, but it is three trains on parallel tracks.)

This gear was expensive and touchy, and you had real engineers keeping it greased and fed and working right. They cost a heap, so hourly rates were high. Not the kind of place to dither away deciding on the color of a font, or if you needed to bump a transition by two frames, while the taxi meter was ticking. Not everybody could afford to dither around in such edit rooms, trying to decide between two shots for an hour. The rooms were in too high of a demand, with waiting lists for access. So there was a second, lower-level “pre-editing” process, called “offline”, you could screw around on that as long as you liked, “off the clock”. You could afford multiple offline suites to feed one master online suite, which was good for productivity.

Offline editing used just two decks and a simple controller; cuts-only, linear tape editing. The gear was simpler and cheaper and so the hourly rates were much lower. What you did in the offline edit was pre-compose the program as much as possible, cut down the raw footage to just the best selected takes, make copious logging notes about each take, and while doing it, you generated an electronic edit decision list, an “EDL” that used time codes to identify all your starts and stops. We stored these lists on floppy disks that looked like medium sized pizzas.

You built the show in cuts-only fashion, spent time experimenting with the pacing of the cuts and so forth, then, when you were ready, you took your EDL and raw tapes to the priests of the Online room. Where, if you were lucky, you could feed the EDL info into the big edit controller, mount up your tapes, and the show would more or less auto-assemble in full quality, just as fast as you could supply each tape cassete or reel, you just had to tell it where your planned transitions and effects would go. This saved many hours at the higher editing rate.

While all that sounds horibly tedious today, it brought a great deal of discipline to the editing process, and you really worked hard on your choices of shots and transitions and timing. You realized how much you could achieve using just cuts. That part, I miss.

Flash forward to the early days of Dv cameras and computer-based NLE systems, where the issues were based around the costs of the media storage. Drive space was rare and costly, even if editing time no longer was, so, the new version of the “offline edit” was to load in your footage in a very low resolution, thus saving space. You did your edit, this time also including the special effects decisions, and you again generated an EDL (Edit Decision List). When you were finally sure about everything, you erased the drives, and used the EDL to re-import at full resolution only those exact frames of video needed for accomplishing the final cut. This was controlled from the EDL data and, if all the gods were appeased, was a self-assembling automatic process. More or less. Sometimes. On good days.

Today, offline generally means the media has become unavailable to the system for one reason or another. And folks doing very big docs or reality shows with hundreds of hours of media, and wanting to save drive space, still do a variation of the low-resolution proxy footage, which is still called “offline” editing.

Oh, I see I need to change the onion on my belt, so we’ll have to stop here.