What's non linear?

This may well be a really dumb question. I've been using FCPX for a while now and really enjoy it. But there's something that's puzzling me: what's non linear? Like everyone else I've referred to FCPX as an NLE but I've never understood the NL part. Are there linear editors around? Is this a historical reference to editing back in the stone age with tape decks? As this board seems to be the place to learn esoteric things pertaining to editing it just seemed the logical place to ask.

That's exactly right. Linear editing was tape based, editing shots sequentially.

Ironic, isn't it? Film editing - on a flatbed or Moviola - was non-linear. You could move a shot (or piece of film) around physically and put it any where you wanted in an edited sequence. But when videotape editing systems were introduced you had to edit sequentially (or linearly) so that you are constantly writing over your edits when you wanted to change the order of your shots. NLE's - non-linear editors - get us back to where we were - more or less.

One step forward - two steps back. Or forward.

Squamish ed wrote: … editing back in the stone age with tape decks? ….

<cough> Neanderthaler man speaking here <cough>
I'm old enough to remember that 'switch' from U-Matic to 'Quantel'... a 250.ooo€ box supporting 40min of video … in proxies (as it called today), final outplay was a EDLlist, driving C-tape-machines to edit in 'final'quality.

Imagine a sequence ABCDEF, and suddenly the client (=me those days), says "No, we have to swap C and B!" = edit on tape means, you have to re-edit everything.

Or, with what I struggeld those days most of the time:
my program HAD to be 20minutes! Not 19'30", nor 20'11"! Imagine the time we spend mostly, just to 'trim' same edits again and again ... (as a sidenote: U-matic didn't deliver frame-precision, we were happy to come close to 3frames)

… but, veterans older than me (hard to imagine…) told me, they scissored 2"-Ampex tapes mechanically! Using a scope to find the 'burst', they edited like audio-editors splicing tapes...

.... If I had known then, 20-30 years ago, what my tiny MacMini allows me to do now, what powers I have here on my kitchen-table ... .... I would've called myself crazy! :woohoo:

Film editing, the cutting of negative film stock, is non linear, it is the how you make decisions, not the device that is important.

With tape it was easier to cut in a linear from start to finish, thus it was termed linear, but you did not have to cut this way, if you were skilled, or had great SMPTE Timecode, you could cut non linear, as long as the master tape was "striped" with the correct time code, for example we had a quaint system called edit master, here you would punch in the time codes for the shots you needed, based of a cheap vhs dub and edit shot list, punch in what transition you wanted, and press GO...It would edit from the source deck onto the master deck, we could do 2 onto 1, 2 b-roll decks onto a master deck...It was not editing per se..just number punching..Most of the time it was horrid and made mistakes..

Final Cut Pro X, with the storyline is actually more of a linear editor, you have to force it into non linear mode with a key stroke...

With the invention of tape, and mini dv, the market became open to anyone with a camera, and editing tv news inserts off mini-dv tapes in a DVCPRO player, yes it could work, was it advisable, NO, but deadlines are deadlines, and I lost count of how many tapes I had to hand spool off the video heads...

That and waiting for DVCPRO 126L tapes to rewind, shot 1 at the head of the tape, shot B, 1 hour 15 min into the recording...bane of my life waiting for tapes to fast forward...Conference editing took forever only as we used 2 hour tapes....Then with FCP 6, you could not ingest faster than 1 to 1, 2 hours to wait to edit...

At least we can start to edit sooner than 2 hours....Yay!!!

About 14 years old (this dates me a bit), Brownie wind up 8mm home camera, cut film with razor, tape it to gather, my introduction to visual media production. So glad to not have to do that now.

I miss the way technology forced me to make creative decisions, the limitations was a blessing, today you can go so far down, get lost and make decisions that may end up right, I am not saying today it is bad, I never edited a movie by hand splicing film negative, the closet I got was using film negative to create a series of slides for a presentation at school.

I found my love of editing through linear tape based editing, became a professional tv news video editor, I do miss the way I was thinking about the best use of material.

News insert editing is vastly different to film editing. with film editing, you have scripts and storyboards to help you visualize the story, with news this is not possible, and no time to storyboard, it is akin to something I read, I read a while back that a coding company, I think Electronic Arts, would test applicants to code a game to work on a ZX spectrum 48k machine, where the coder was used to 32bit and so on...This was to see how they coped with the concept of limits...

I like the philosophy of FCPX, in the way it is not a true non linear, as its older version FCP 1-7 was...I find am making crative decisions they way I was making them in tape editing, which for me is great...