Negative cutting is part of the post-production process and occurs after editing and prior to striking internegatives and release prints.
In some countries, due to the high cost of online suites, negative cutting is still used for commercials by reducing footage.
Increasingly feature films are bypassing the negative cutting process altogether and are being scanned directly from the uncut rushes.
The existence of digital intermediates (DI) has created a new demand for negative cutters to extract selected takes which are cut from the rushes and re-spliced into new rolls (in edit order) to reduce the volume of footage for scanning.
In the case of feature films the selected roll and online EDL are sent to a post production facility for scanning as a digital intermediate.
For television commercials or series the selected takes and EDL are sent to a post production facility for re-telecine and compiled in an Online Suite for final grading.
The first commercially available software product was OSC/R (pronounced "Oscar"), a DOS-based application developed in Toronto, Canada by The Adelaide Works.
Research In Motion later moved on to bigger things and invented the BlackBerry Wireless Email Phone and is now a publicly listed company.