Cutting together recorded material according to a prepared scheme such as a rough cut or EDL. EDLs can be used to directly control conforming in an online edit suite (auto-conforming). The time to conform varies widely, from a tape-based suite which takes much longer than the finished programme running time, to a nonlinear online suite with true random access to all material. This reduces time by loading material in C-mode (in the order it is recorded rather than the order required for the finished programme) and the conforming itself takes only a moment and still allows any subsequent adjustments to be easily made.

Note that with in-server editing, material may be loaded onto the server as an independent task, rather than involving the edit equipment itself. This circumvents the loading time so further reducing the total time to produce the finished programme. The same is also true of nonlinear edit systems with the bandwidth to support background loading.