Non-linear editing

A non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing system that can perform random access on the source material.

The very earliest non-linear film and video editors used laserdisc storage, but were quickly superseded by editing systems that used computer disk storage and compressed video.

The elements of a computer based non-linear editing system for video are a computer with a video editing card or video capture card and video editing software.

The first two computer software based systems were Lightworks and Avid, and they forever changed the way that films and TV programmes were edited. Both systems used custom hardware for video processing.

With the availability of commodity video processing hardware, many software packages are now available for non-linear digital video editing, including:

Adobe Systems Premiere Pro [1]
Avid XPress Pro [2] (realtime)
Boris
Cinelerra (free software) [3]
Discreet edit
E-mix
Apple Computer Final Cut Express/Pro [4]
iMovie (also from Apple Computer) [5]
Kino for Linux [6]
Lightworks
MainActor (available for Linux, Macintosh and Windows) [7]
Media 100
Sony Vegas [8](formerly published by SonicFoundry [9])
VirtualDub (free, GPL video software for Microsoft Windows)
VirtualDubMod (VirtualDub with lots of added formats and features)