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Video: Linear Video Editing (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-06 23:14:16
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hey everyone, here's a video. Once again the comments are off because I made several egregious errors, so I will be re-rendering and re-uploading, but I figure I'll release it on Monday so I have a while to get feedback first. I am absolutely astonished that this video came together the way it did, the writing and experimentation took much less time than I expected, and I'm really proud of the result. I think I did as good a job as anybody of demonstrating linear editing, so if you don't get it after watching this, there's probably no way to get it short of doing it, and that's a lot better than I anticipated. I was worried about the result being hard to parse, but I don't think it is. Hopefully you agree!

Files

Linear Editing RC1

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cathoderaydude Tip me: https://ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude

Comments

sdomi

oh gosh i've been waiting for this one!!!!

Akshay Anand

Lol why do you have to release it at 5 AM, just as I'm trying to sleep

cornboy

hey dude, i sent you a dm

George Dorn

One thing that kinda frustrates me, now that I'm dipping my toes into youtubing, is how much video editing is unchanging. Now that we have NLE, everybody's making NLEs with minor tweaks and updates. Some more effects, some more transistions, maybe some things work faster. But where's the next big upgrade that removes the tedium and hassle of NLE editing? This does give a lot of context to how KDEnlive is set up. I was initially a bit confused why there was a clip previewer and an output previewer, but they're modeling the 'mark in/out' behavior of these decks. I'm still unconvinced it's the best way to handle this in this era; in fact, I'd really like a workflow analogous to the 'event' memory in that deck. But I'm still learning the tools, maybe I have more options. Anything to make editing not take 3-4x as long as recording would be nice, though...

George Dorn

Also, you've got some restarts about the u-matic tangent around 22:39, which I think is... not a bit? 53:50 you say "false start" twice Oh. you probably know these already.

Anonymous Freak

I am definitely one of "the olds" who still calls "87 octane car fuel" "Unleaded" instead of "Regular" (which is what my kid calls it,) because to me, "Regular" means "leaded." And it was already phased out by the time I had my first car! I just grew up with my parents having one leaded and one unleaded car, in a state with no self-service, so very used to hearing my parents say "regular" or "unleaded" when filling up.

Tim J

Amazingly, LTO is still very common in video production, even at mid-size companies. If you need to regularly archive tons of footage that you're unlikely to ever need again, but absolutely need to keep around just in case, tape makes a lot of sense for its lower cost per TB and long-term reliability.

Chas Becht

The "total" button looks to me like a modifier that would make "reset" "edit start" "preview" or "review" apply to all of the programmed edit events instead of just the current one. That's my guess anyway.

Bill Florio

As a long time linear editor I'm so excited to watch tonight!

cathoderaydude

Thrilled to hear it, please go easy on me when you find the things I get wrong, haha. I have no doubt I made some mistakes

Henry O'Keeffe

When I first watched the extension cord video, I initially assumed it was for some later video where it would make sense. But by the time I had finished it, in my awe, I had forgotten there was ever anything weird about it until now.

Chas Becht

That was the better part of a year of my middle school Television Production class crammed into an hour and a half. Weirdly nostalgic vibes.

Ed Thee Goose

This brings back a lot of memories. My parents owned a full VHS linear editing setup as they shot video professionally. It definitely was not one of the dad setups. I remember playing with all those buttons back in the late 80s.

Strawberry Daquiri

Oh, I am gonna watch the hell outta this when i get home from work :3

Chris

Oh hell yeah this was good, I love video editing detritus. I hope this means there will be a Casablanca Avio video at some point in the future!

Anonymous Freak

51:48 - You made me sit through training _I ALREADY HAD!_ I learned all this back in high school, to help run the high school TV station. I mostly did editing of sports footage for sports I knew almost nothing about. :-D "Uh, people are cheering, must have been good for us, we'll include that!"

qdoggie

i hope the quick start theme gets played during the cassette dub sequence

Anonymous Freak

I really enjoyed the false start when talking about making a false start in the video-within-a-video. Meta, man...

Shanix

Holy carp, what an amazing video! I knew, conceptually, about the beginning of linear editing as you described (i.e. cutting film) and the current state of NLEs, but I had no idea about the dubbing era in between. And it makes perfect sense that it would exist as it did, because this just makes sense! You explained this perfectly, I understood every moment of it. Congrats on the first try edit too, that was neat to see. Also that bus photo... dude. That's a top ten lifetime kind of shot.

deafhobbit

dropping in to say this is really really good. well done.

Bulk Bogan

I've been waiting for the same thing with audio. Why does Photoshop have lasso and object selection, but once you get to audio and video editing, there's no easy way to lasso a video subject or lasso an instrument? It's obviously a difficult question, but I definitely agree personally that it's weird how much video and audio editing has just kinda been OK with being serviceable.

Neil Morrow

shit, I work at Channel 9 News now

Neil Morrow

Seriously though, awesome video. Always a joy to see RC's on patreon.

Cai Tastrophe

Not quite done watching this yet but I wanted to say I think this is one of my favourite videos of yours ever :)

Cai Tastrophe

Oh also, about that "audio split" button: could that be for doing J-cuts/L-cuts, maybe?

George Dorn

This is somewhere that I think maybe "AI" has some use. A bit like how denoiseit/Rmnoise is modestly useful for automatic noise removal. It'll take a while to get out of the "general purpose LLM looking for a problem" and back into applying machine learning to specific tasks, and it's going to need to include UX for local post-training fine-tuning models to do what you want them to do. This does exist, sorta, but it's seriously painful and janky and has basically no UI outside of Jupyter and getting it working with an NLE for manual fixing afterwards is painful. I did play with one NLE that pretended to be capable of generating STT subtitles and associating them with 'scenes', which is one possible avenue for future development, but it only barely worked at all, with more errors than successes... It might have been Resolve, but I can't remember at this point.

David Hildreth

Nah, it's great for long-term storage.

Freya Fractal

ok, real talk here? We think you have just given us, a blind girl, options, in the year of our whatthefuck 2025, for highly accessible video editing. Dealing with video editing in an NLE... sucks. Sucks so much ass. But doing it with physical decks? Like this? Honestly, if we had a few of those WVHS decks, we could, right here, right now, do decent, FHD, video editing, with two of them and an AG-A770. We are seriously considering investing in, like, a camcorder, a few decks, and a controller for that exact purpose.

Strawberry Daquiri

ah, burning in the timecode on a new tape. takes me right back to highschool :3

cathoderaydude

If the UI is the primary appeal, you might be able to get the same experience from much newer, hard drive / SSD based systems. I can't name any offhand but I'm pretty sure that I've seen gear that basically simulates a tape-based workflow. You might find something in the Panasonic P2HD or Sony XDCAM lineups.

Freya Fractal

ooooo, that might be useful, yes! Honestly though the clunks and sound of the deck operating are helpful, like we could *hear* the preroll happening and the beeps for "hey, it's editing" and "and now it's not". Plus we suspect that there might be more menus and such to deal with in an hdd/ssd-based workflow, even with dedicated hardware? Damnit, you've turned us into a retro video nerd!

triggthediscovery

Great video! I wonder how hard it would be to program a Raspberry Pi/SFF PC to emulate the VTRs the system uses by conforming to the serial spec. If anything, it would remove the mechanical element and be a lot easier to maintain long term, and the idea of using 80s tape editors to edit HD video linearly is very funny.

skyhawk

I can't tell if this is an editing/chroma-key error or not - your end credits scroll appears to be either appearing or *reflecting* on the tape on the table next to you. Around 1:27:30-ish From watching the very beginning of the scroll, it's clear this is a chroma-key error - the credits are showing up in the tape window before they've started scrolling to where we can actually see them on the wall.

Alexandre Richer

Some "formal" material on dub editing might be found in military training material; I know that at least the Canadian military had A/V training, and on-base/on-ship TV stations, the US probably also did. The libraries of high schools with a vocational program or community colleges might also have some material from back then.

David Hildreth

I loved linear editing. My college and then first job at a TV station had some linear tasks, although it was 2003, so that's also the era that I learned Avid. We would start by striping a tape with black and timecode. Programs started at 1:00:00;00, so that means there is some space for pre-roll, then the slate is at 0:59:53;00 and so forth. All of the editing was done as inserts so that you didn't break the TC. From what I remember 5 minute tapes really existed for dozens or hundreds of dubs for :30 commercials. Programs were shot on longer tapes. I forget what 'audio split' does, but I think it's L or J cut related. At 1:11:20 the thing you're describing is 3-point editing. In an NLE, you can take your source footage, put it in the source monitor, then put your hand over JKL, hit play, then mark a clip with I & O. Hit the insert button (in Premiere it's .) and then play again to mark the next clip ... you're doing the same thing as an A/B edit controller. No mouse involved. It's still a common way I'll start an edit or make selects from an interview. Linear editing, logging a tape for batch capture, and now with files from a memory card, it's all surprisingly the same.

Freya Fractal

ok, another update: Holy shit we are absolutely investing in some linear video capture and editing hardware. This video has given us a set of skills and resources for using those skills that we never ever expected to use. We have tried with NLEs, and just.... no. Can't get our head around it, plus the accessibility *sucks*. Now we need to figure out where to get a decent pair of decks, camera (or should we use a camcorder? Can't decide between a dedicated recorder and a camera or a camcorder), plus decide on a format. It's going to be analogue, for sure, digital formats, even tape-based ones, just present too many potential options and too many ways for things to go *wrong*. Just need to figure out how to get all this gear in NZ. If we were in Cascadia, well, we'd go to the bloody RePC. But we're not, so we have to figure something out.

Wonkodon.com Fund

Maybe the Colt powerstrip separated so that you could use just the top part on a wall outlet.

Aaronjamt

You can also see the credits on the right side panel of the left VTR, near the front of the unit. Looks like there's vents or something there that let just enough light from the wall through to trigger the chroma key.

Bill Florio

I had several Casablancas. I still have a kron machine under my bed. The Xbox of editors!

Bill Florio

I also was the first person to retrofit my Casablanca with scsi to ide removable hdd caddy. I ordered it from some catalog called macnallys. The guy asked me why I ordered 5 adapters and then became a Casablanca dealer.

cathoderaydude

hah, whoops. I had a *lot* of blue spill from the wall on the gear in this video and I neglected to watch through the credits; I'll fix it in the final release.

cathoderaydude

Thanks! As far as I know it's just RS232 and since there's cross-manufacturer compatibility, I'm gonna assume the protocol is documented somewhere, so it should be pretty easy. Honestly, you wouldn't even need any emulation - I'm sure you could just write a utility that talks to the controller over a couple PC serial ports and maps the functions into an NLE. Honestly that would be a pretty neat project that would make a lot of these devices useful again.

Bill Florio

Great job! You really covered all the bases and the minolta piece was pure poetry. Thanks for giving a shout out to hybrid, the fastest editing solution of all time. I realized someone made a video on this a while back https://youtu.be/TSHNjWMBNa0?si=yX8A0XCrxsTkoLLK

cathoderaydude

I do actually have a Casablanca of some stripe (the company made so many models with different names, I'm really not sure which one it is) and I have to admit, my response when I tried it out was "oh wow, that's one primitive UI" - but it seems like it was pretty revolutionary when it first came out, and I don't think even by the Avio/Kron era (circa 2000) that you could get a comparably smooth editing experience on a PC/Mac, at least not without a stack of dedicated hardware like an Avid rig. It's definitely something I want to cover, though I feel like I'd really want to find out more about their earlier products (the amiga and unlicensed-amiga based ones) first, and that'll take quite some effort to research.

Cory P.

I have been waiting for this video since the big marathon stream where one or two of these editors were shown off. And now you made it, and it's what I hoped (as always, because you are very consistent). And that is just pretty cool.

cathoderaydude

That's my assumption, I meant more that I have no idea how to *operate* it, haha.

cathoderaydude

Thanks so much! And thank you for the link - I came across this card in a magazine once while looking for early edit accelerator cards and wondered what it looked like in action!

cathoderaydude

Oh, I bet you're right! It has that set of lines pointing to reset and edit - reset probably wipes the entire "project", while edit probably dubs out the entire project from event 1, ignoring the "already dubbed" flag in memory. I should try that and find out!

Lawrence Billson

Thanks for making this - you've brought back some special memories from my childhood. As a kid, I'd sometimes get to go to work with my dad when school was out. They had a small edit suite to make educational videos. I remember learning the basics of video editing as a 10 year old, but everything had faded after 35+ years; you brought it all back. I did get a small level of anxiety when you didn't record any colour bars at the start! Even when I was monkeying about editing together a mix-tape of Inspector Gadget I always had to record the colour bars!

Nightshade System

every time i see one of these videos i drop everything to watch it immediately (fyi the right term for "cannot go backwards" is "monotonic" not "monotonous"! it's used when dealing with time in computer science, ie programming, which is where we know it from)

cathoderaydude

I meant to! I forgot my camera could generate them and then it was too late, haha. Glad you enjoyed the video!

Matthew Cooper

Please continue to leave in the moments where it's obvious to the viewer that you didn't rehearse anything prior to film day.

cathoderaydude

Not sure if this is a joke? I spent like five days in the studio over two weeks getting everything straightened out and practicing. But when the unexpected happens I do try to keep it for the texture.

Matthew Cooper

My comment was meant to have a joking tone. I instantly regretted wording it that way and tried to get back here to edit before you caught it. I do really appreciate the amount of effort you put in. I will leave it as an example of how not to phrase things. Those moments are humanizing and as someone who struggles with getting other people to understand my thought process at times I can relate to them.

cathoderaydude

Oh don't worry about it, I probably sounded more irritated than I intended there, heh. I knew you weren't making a jab, just wasn't sure if you actually thought this was all ad-hoc. It's always a mix of well rehearsed and seat-of-the-pants performance, and I always wonder how clear that is to everyone watching.

Danny Beans

I understand why you couldn't find much information about that splitter. Googling "Colt Foursome" probably doesn't yield the most productive results, even with safe search.

Nick R

Related but unrelated: have you (all) tried or do you have thoughts on the Logitech MX creative console? Essentially a mini stream deck and a jog wheel thingy. Half the price of that blackmagic controller. I'm sure not as optimized, but also maybe more general purpose?

David Groover

Hello! I never comment, but dang it I would be remiss if I didn't lobby for Blender (yes, the 3D modeling program) to be included in the list of NLEs at the beginning. Most people don't even know Blender has a video editor in it! (Though, realistically I don't expect you'd reshoot the opening, it's an unreasonable ask for sure)

Avi Physics

Maybe the real lesson is that a heavy duty mechanical edit keyboard is a lot of fun.

Mikko Wilson

Yup, by setting different audio & video in/out points, it's exactly for J & L edits.

Mikko Wilson

Fun fact: Film editing with cutting & splicing is NON-Linear, as you can go back to an earlier part of the film and (re-)make edits (including changing the length of those edits) and the rest of the (already edited) film will move (ripple) to accommodate the edit. Which means... The physical cut & tape editing of Quad tape is also non-linear. Video editing was non-linear before it was linear!

Mikko Wilson

Another term for the first record of control & TC tracks to tape is called "Striping" as you are laying down those tracks - or strips - onto the tape. It was also really common to use color bars for this, as it made it clear that it wasn't supposed to be part of the final edit. Not sure if the "stripes" of the bars also lead into the name striping. Typically when striping is when you would take the time to set your TC generator for the appropriate start time. For example it was common to start your stripe TC at 00;59;00;00 to give you time for bars, slate, countdown, a couple of seconds of black, and then the actual edit to begin at 01;00;00;00 As the SMTPE (29.97fps) timecode range is 00;00;00;00 - 23;59;59;29 there is no "negative" time, so you couldn't have the edit begin at 0, as you needed the time for preroll.

Mikko Wilson

Also, when striping (be it bars or black) tapes, it was common to pre-do that in batches during downtime so that you didn't need to wait when you needed a tape to work with. My process was to take the tape out of the package, stripe it, then stick the blank label sticker on it, then put it on the shelf. So a "prepared" tape had a blank label and the control/TC tracks laid. And when re-cycling tapes, you'd "erase" an old tape by re-striping it and putting a new blank label sticker over the old one. I still do the same process when I format memory cards.

Mikko Wilson

I haven't quite finished watching yet, but some thoughts on Assemble vs Insert Editing... When you do an Assemble edit, the playback portion of the preroll process is also used to lock the internal control track & TC generators to the tape just ahead of the edit as it plays. That way when it switches to record, it can lay down those tracks anew in sync, picking up where they left off. For that reason, at the end of the edit, you get the glitch between the newly (re-)recorded control & TC tracks and what was already underneath on the striped tape. So you stripe was worthless beyond an assemble edit. BUT that made things faster! You only needed to stripe the start of your tape. Then you could just assemble your A-roll right onto it very quickly, just be sure to assemble some black onto the end. Then go back later and insert you B-roll. The fastest way to edit was to use Assemble and only set In points! Player IN, Recorder IN, hit [Auto Edit]... The decks will perform the frame accurate IN edit, and then just keep recoding until they run out of tape. You'd do that and watch it as it did it. Once it rolled past your desired out point, you'd just hit [All stop], and then *after* the edit had been recorded would you go and set the "out" point by just backing up the tape and setting your IN point for the next edit in that location to assemble from. The same works in a modem NLE: Just mark an IN on a source clip, drop it in the timeline, then mark IN on the next source clip and drop it into the timeline where you want it to go overwriting the "tail" of the previous clip. The same process was used in tape based camcorders. If you had reviewed the tape at all, or put in a new one, you had to hit the "Return" button which would do the pre-roll action and then leave the camera in pause, locked to the right TC & control track position, ready to record. All tape based camcorders were effectively Assemble editing as they went. Pros knew that your did *not* want timecode interruptions in your source tape, or you wouldn't be able to use the first few seconds of clips of you couldn't get a stable preroll.

Mikko Wilson

On some prosumer (& even some consumer) grade VCRs, you could actually perform frame accurate Assemble editing without a controller beyond a standard IR remote, if you had 2 matching decks. Play your source footage, pause at the in point, adjust frame by frame while in pause mode as desired. Leave the player in (play-)pause mode. Now, before it un-pauses into stop... On your record deck, also play & pause at your in-point, step/jog as necessary. Then, here's the trick: while in play-pause mode, press the record button. This would place many VCRs into record-pause mode. It's now ready to record, but it's holding position in the tape at your in-point. Ok, now, grab your IR remote, take a step back, point it at both decks, and hit the "pause" button on the remote to un-pause both decks. The player goes from play-pause into play, and the recorder goes from record-pause to record; and the edit has started, frame accurately. When you are done, just hit stop. Back up the recorder to the next in point and repeat. It wasn't quite as stable as professional editing with the transports "at speed", but it was decent.

sdomi

> It is endlessly funny to me that I can make people sit through training for a job they'll never have i feel DEEPLY called out

framedragger

head up that you left in a couple false start takes that you go back and start over again.

framedragger

@ 22:25 you start a line three times

Kerne

I'm fine with this. I spend most of my time learning about old electronics and computers I'll probably never use. The learning process itself is a nice dopamine hit. ;)

sdomi

hah, I'm fine with this too! this is why i'm here! ^^

framedragger

happens again at 53:45. which is funny because the thing you inadvertently repeat is "i had a false start"

Chas Becht

Yeah, I was trying to work from those lines backward to what functionality would make sense. I believe you made a comment in the video about pro gear having a tendency to "to what makes sense" and that resonated strongly with me. Button layout and symbology tends to be pretty deliberate, and if you think about the use cases and stare at the control panel long enough, you usually can come up with something plausible.

Chas Becht

Oh, hey! It's there a "total" button on the other deck that doesn't have support for multiple events? If not, that's another clue that it's related to that feature.

Chicken

I thought this was an intentional joke 🤭

cathoderaydude

yup, had those on the errata for RC2 but I appreciate it!

Freya Fractal

further update: currently have extensive design notes for a self-contained two-vDeck analogue SD capture and edit device. These notes involve large steel cases and weighted metal disks to simulate (for realism and accessibility purposes) the sound *and* inertia of a betacam SP transport.

Travis Snoozy

[DS9 wormhole aliens, one after the other] Linear time? Linear time. Linear time! I'm looking forward to this.

cathoderaydude

I tried so hard to fit in clips of Emissary and just couldn't get it across the line. I tried *so hard* and I'm so sad that I couldn't do it.

Jonathan V

"Every PC based video editor falls under this same banner" ~ 45s... VirtualDub may not be getting new releases anymore, the last release was a "few" years ago ... I feel like it deserves an honorable mention for PC-based linear editing, I've used it in the last decade... so while maybe all currently supported video editors are NLE it wasn't that long ago VirtualDub was "current".

Jonathan V

I'd leave the u-matic repeat in, you got stuck on u-matic just like the studios :D

exedore

Got my first pro video job in summer 2000 and most of the work was still being done on linear - basically the only thing being pushed to the NLE station was high end industrial edits. Most of the company's work was dance recitals, cheerleading competitions, school plays, etc. and that meant dropping in titles was the biggest thing to do in post besides covering up any shooting errors (most shoots were three camera and would be mixed live on site), so it was seen as significantly faster to run it through on a linear system than transfer it, do the edits, and play it all back out. Shoots were done on a mix of SVHS and Satan's ultimate insult to the world of video, JVC's D9. The big difference, however, was that by the time I worked there, edits weren't being done solely on a board like here, but controlled through everybody's favourite computer interface: Video Toaster. Yep, titles would be set up by an assistant (while I was there, me) on one Amiga with a taped up monitor covering the overscan, then passed off on floppies to the editor who'd queue up the drops in Toaster and go for a smoke while it ran. Ah, the good old days...

Henry O'Keeffe

Actually, that's all I've ever used Blender for. I'm so sorry Blender

Travis Snoozy

I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I *can* live with it. 😉😂❤️

Loading_M_

Some quick searching shows that it's more likely RS422 (which uses differential signaling), using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Pin_Protocol developed by Sony. Additionally, the wikipedia page links to several non-tape based recorders that implement the protocol. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/hyperdeckstudio appears to still be sold new, with the 9pin connector still present on the larger models. I would guess that there are (or were) cameras that output the sony 9pin commands to allow the camera operator to control the tape deck from the camera itself, so it's remained as a feature.

Loading_M_

As noted in another comment of mine, it looks like BlackMagicDesigns stills sells modern VTRs that support these decks.

Loading_M_

I'm not 100% sure this is the correct term for film. Yes, it's monotonic in CS, where you need it to never go backwards, but I wouldn't be surprised if film also requires that it increase at a constant rate (i.e., you can't just freeze in-place for a while). I know that several monotonic clock implementations will at least slow down, or even freeze in place, if the clock does weird things. This is generally displayed by clock sources that pull from wall clock time, which can, in fact, go backwards (i.e. daylight savings or fixing accumulated error over time). They simply record the last timestamp they saw, and refuse to output anything older. Modern Linux has a monotonic clock source in the kernel, which actually does a bunch of stuff to ensure the clock always counts up. The Linux monotonic clock doesn't actually give you the current time, but rather the time since the computer last booted - hence why it can avoid many of the issues with wall time.

Asaf Sagi

I do miss that marathon stream, particularly the cat rating segment. Any chance you can upload that, Gravis?

Aidan Rayner

The commentary you made near the end of the video about digital vs analogue/film made me think of my Sony Mavica cameras. I feel like they're a mix of both in some senses - you have the ability to take as many pictures as you want and delete them to to your liking, but you only get so many "good" shots to keep. I quite like that and it makes me experiment, makes me want to get the best shot possible. But if I don't? No biggie, just delete and try again. You get 4 shots per floppy on the FD200, so I pack 5-10 diskettes and head out to see what I can capture. And then I just copy them to whatever PC I feel like using to copy them (usually my ThinkPad X31 with the LS120 drive) and carry on. It's great fun!