For the people who grew up in the non-linear era with Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, we’re a little spoiled. Actually, a lot spoiled. We can edit something from beginning to end on our computers and not really give that much thought to the process going on underneath the hood.

That wasn’t the case before, and still isn’t the case in many production environments. You see, more often than not, we modern editors are doing something without even noticing: we’re combining offline and online editing. Essentially, it used to be that you captured much smaller, lower quality versions of files, and edited those. That was offline. Then, you’d send your edit to another department (or do it yourself) and they would do the online editing, meaning they would put in the full quality files from the source tapes, color correct, etc.

Now, you probably capture at full HD and edit at full HD because our computers can handle it. It’s simpler, and for a smaller operation, it makes sense.

But even though we’re editing in different ways, the fundamentals under the hood are still the same.

Numbers Under the Hood

For this example, I’m going to use Final Cut Pro.

Let’s say you have a 45 minute tape of HD footage, and you capture it into FCP, end to end. Now, that tape is file on your hard drive, sitting in a folder. Go to your project assets folder, and you can check it out and even play it from the finder.

However, go into Final Cut, and you can chop it up, move it around, color correct it, and mess with the audio. After all that, you can go back and still find your 45 minute file, just sitting there, not touched.

The reason for this is Final Cut is a non-destructive editor. It’s not actually touching your captured files at all, it’s just referencing them and creating data about the different editing decisions you’ve made. A cut on this tape at this time, placed on the timeline here, with this filter and this data. That’s all it needs to know, really, and then it plays it back.

When you get down to it, editing is all about numbers: timecode and other data referencing tapes. Those tapes just happen to be sitting in digital form on your hard drive. That’s why your Final Cut Pro project file is always so small. It’s just data – the files are elsewhere.

Could I Get That In a List?

It makes sense then, that since you can export a video file from Final Cut (where it pulls together all that data and mixes the video together into a file), you can export a version of just the data. This is called an Edit Decision List, or EDL.

EDLs are a list of every editing decision for an entire project, in sequence. Theoretically, if you lose your entire project, if you have the EDL, you can rebuild the edit. Pretty crazy.

Now, like many things on the computer, there are many types of formats that all vary slightly (thanks, computers), but most EDLs share the same basic data from the classic CMX EDL format:

Event Number:  Just a sequential number. Primary key, for my database people.

Source ID: ID for the video or media source. Some programs place limits on this in terms of length.

Edit Mode: Is this decision on video track 1 (V1) or audio track 1 (A1) or both (VA1) or maybe another combo? That goes here, and the format in which it is denoted varies.

Transition Type: C for Cut, D for Dissolve. You get the idea, and you also get the frame numbers in there for dissolves. These also vary and are not standardized.

Source in/Source Out: Timecode of where you are taking the video from the original source.

Record in/Record Out: Timecode of where the video you took appears on the tape or timeline.

For example, here is a CMX-format EDL for a very short, basic video with straight cuts:

You can also get a much more complicated version:

As you can see, in Final Cut, there are a lot of EDL options to choose from. Which ones you use (and which ones you use on any program) depends on the needs of the project. The person who needs the EDL will usually be able to tell you what kind of settings they need on the export. What you need to know is that EDLs exist, and in many cases are essential to the production workflow.