Advancements in technology have made the editing process faster and, some would say, more creative than it used to be. Directors and editors are now able to make and view changes instantly with digital workstations. Computer-generated visual effects can be easily laid in for the director to see. The days of cataloguing strips of film, splicing scenes together, and running them on a flatbed editing machine have given way to transferring film to tape through a process called telecine, then digitizing the taped scenes, which are viewed and edited on a digital editing system such as an Avid® or Final Cut Pro®. The scenes are stored as files and can be opened or transferred to other computers in a flash. Digital editing systems are also helpful when creating optical effects, such as fades or dissolves.

Once picture editing is underway, sound must be added. Although most of the dialogue recorded during production is used, it usually needs to be cleaned up, by removing pops and hisses, or replaced through ADR, Automatic Dialogue Replacement, in which an actor re-records lines of dialogue in a studio to match the picture. This process is commonly called looping, referring to the strip of film that used to be repeatedly played in a "loop".

A loop group adds background murmuring, also known as "walla", in the same way. A group of actors records conversations about specific things related to the scene. The walla is added later to create the effect of normal background conversations.