What is an NLE?

The short answer is Non-Linear Editing.

The medium answer? It’s the software we use to edit movies, television, YouTube videos, commercials, pretty much any video you watch today.

The longer answer only makes sense once you understand how editing used to work.

When cinema was invented in the late 1800s, films were exactly what their name suggests: long strips of photographic film. Cameras exposed light onto the film stock, laboratories developed it, and editors worked with the physical reels themselves. If they wanted to remove a shot, they literally cut the film with a razor blade. If they wanted to insert a new one, they taped or cemented the pieces back together using a tool called a splicer.

Original edit rooms would have looked like tables covered in film reels, hanging strips of celluloid, pencil marks, and bins filled with hundreds of little pieces of film. The terminology has stuck, and even now on our digital computers, editing is still built on making cuts, splices, and slips to arrange footage in bins and combine them into a movie or video.

This original process was technically non-linear and very close to the modern system. Editors could physically cut into the middle of a reel and rearrange scenes to build out sequences. But as you can imagine, physically and literally cutting a movie, reel by reel, was also slow, cumbersome, and destructive. Every cut meant physically altering your workprint.

Then television changed everything.

Unlike film, videotape couldn’t simply be cut and taped back together for professional editing. Instead, editors assembled a program by copying one tape onto another.

Imagine you have three shots: A, B, and C. You record Shot A onto a master tape, then Shot B, then Shot C in that exact order. This allowed for combinations and edits to be assembled “instantly” and gave birth to the first digital era of filmmaking. While undoubtedly faster and more efficient, tape editing introduced an unfortunate creative limitation to the editing workflow. If you later realize you want to insert a five-second shot between A and B, you can’t just untape the reel of film, splice in your new shot, and tape it back together. The tape has nowhere to make room. If you tried to record a new shot onto the tape, it would overwrite everything that followed.

So, instead, editors would have to restart at the beginning of the tape and re-record the rest of the edit with the new changes. On a finished hour-long program, changing five seconds near the beginning could mean rebuilding almost the entire show. This workflow, and the tools built for it, introduced the era of Linear Editing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, systems like CMX and Avid Media Composer began storing video digitally on hard drives. Unlike tape, these systems were able to reference the videos on the hard drive and instantly access any piece of information without reading everything before it. As opposed to thinking about footage like tape, with each second following the previous, editors could now jump to any frame instantly and start to assemble footage completely independently of previous frames or shots.

That change gave birth to Non-Linear Editing, or the NLE, the term still used today to refer to all modern editing software.

Even though that description is accurate, it still misses an interesting novelty in modern editing: unlike tape or film before it, modern NLEs don’t actually edit your footage.

When you drag a clip into Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, or Avid, you’re almost never changing the original media. The software simply creates a list of instructions that tell your computer how to play the files in whatever order, and from whatever point you tell it. When you assemble footage on a timeline and hit play, the software essentially tells your computer to, “Play this file from this frame to this frame, then jump to this other file.”

That’s why deleting a clip from your timeline doesn’t delete the original video file. The timeline is really just metadata describing how the footage should be assembled.

Modern editing software never really edits the video itself. You’re editing instructions.

Today we almost never say the full phrase. We just call them NLEs: Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer.

The name survives now as an afterthought — many editors don’t even know its origins. But it remains as a remnant and a reminder that you are editing in the modern era. Perhaps one day vintage editors will start talking about cutting movies on NLEs as we move into some other, new method of editing, and a new acronym will take the NLE’s place. But for now, next time you see NLE on a spec sheet or website, you’ll know what it means and just how far editors have come.