Final Cut Pro allows you to do offline editing with reduced-quality copies of your media
files, and then reingest your footage at full quality for the final online edit.

About Offline and Online Editing

The offline/online workflow allows you to use temporary, reduced-quality copies of your
footage to edit with, and then finish your project with full-quality media. Reduced-quality
media files require less hard disk space and less computing power to process transitions
and effects. This means you can edit on an inexpensive computer or a portable computer
and then finish at full quality on another system. Once the creative cutting is complete,
the online editing phase (also referred to as the finishing phase) focuses on image quality,
color correction, proper broadcast video levels, and so on.

The two phases—offline and online editing—are connected via an Edit Decision List
(EDL), or other project interchange file, which is used to transfer all of your editing choices
from the finished reduced-quality session to the final high-quality session.

Offline Editing

Editing with reduced-quality copies of your media files allows you to fit more media on
your scratch disks and improve playback and real-time effects performance (especially
when using slower hard disks, such as in portable computers). This phase can last from
a few days to several years, depending on the scope of the project, the amount of footage,
and so on.

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Offline and Online Editing