History of Video Editing

 were very expensive, and the quality loss of copying was so great, that 2 inch Quadruplex videotape was edited by visualizing the recorded track with ferrofluid, cutting with a razor blade or guillotine cutter and splicing with tape. Improvements in quality and economy, and the invention of the flying erase head, allowed new video to be inserted cleanly into an existing tape. This technique was referred to as linear editing. If an early scene needed to be lengthened, all the later scenes would need to be added again. Multiple sources could be played back simultaneously through a vision mixer to be mixed or keyed. The increased popularity of online video clips has produced a large increase in video editing activity by Internet users. The Internet has become an important source of low-cost video-editing tools.