-
if you’re a one man band, is there any advantage to using Prelude over Premiere for logging footage???
I’ve read in many places that Prelude was essentially designed as a collaboration tool for multiple editors working on the same project and as a simple rough cutting program to allow someone to put together a quick rough cut for an editor to later refine in Premiere. I also read that the program is not really necessary for if you’re a one man band setup doing all the editing yourself. Is this still the case?
I’m about to start cutting a long format documentary with an enormous amount of footage, over 100 clips. To log all this media, I’m wondering whether I should be using Premiere or would I be better served using Prelude? The media in question is already on the computer but needs to be sifted through and scenes annotated. Would there by any advantage to using Prelude over Premiere when it comes to simply logging (not sharing, transcoding, or importing).
-
7 Replies
-
I addition to the capabilities you described…
A lot of what Prelude can help with is organizing material in the filesystem…
Paul Neumann seems to be the resident expert on this…
cheers….
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX -
I use Prelude a lot and I love to work alone! Get off my lawn! It’s great for exactly what you’re needing to do. I’m hardly ever at a shoot anymore, but cards/drives just get dropped off and the hunt begins. The advantages to using it for me is I create a tag template for each gig that includes camera name, composition (CU, MCU, 2 shot, etc.), Day #, Talent/Character, Broll, interior, exterior and on and on. So I ingest the shots and run through them quickly tagging them then go back and start subclipping. It’s much easier to remove unwanted camera roll with the excellent waveform display you get along with the video and marking multiple parts of a clip is a breeze. You literally hit one key to add an in and you immediately have an open description window to type in, hit enter and set the out. Done.
Sort all the clips by subclip or however you want, put them in bins, whatever. Then highlight anything you’ve created and send to PPro and it shows up just like you had it. All the media is then searchable by the tags or descriptions and those same things can be used to create smart folders in your project bin.
The big thing is it was MADE to do what you want to do. Yes, you can mark and subclip in PPro but it’s way clumsy compared to doiing it Prelude. And what you do in Prelude stays with the media unlike what happens in PPro. So down the road if you load a clip you’ve marked in Prelude into another project the markers and subclips will come along for the ride. You only have to find the best part of a clip once and it will always be there for you. Or you just return to the original Prelude project and find what you want that way. Easier than going back to a big edit project.
Thanks Alex, but I’d consider myself the resident fan!
-
Thank you very much for that detailed feedback Paul. I’m so glad I started learning Prelude for all those reasons you just mentioned.
I was also quite impressed with the waveform display in that film strip window and found it very convenient for dialogue. Like looking at the film strip in FCPX where you see the waveform right under the picture. I’m also just now also starting to get used to those “tags”. Is that a new feature that came with the CC update? I don’t recall seeing it in CS6, but yes it’s super convenient.Thanks again Paul. You’ve convinced me to go with Prelude for logging. Definitely more versatile than Premiere when it comes to marking and noting shots.
Quick question: is it possible to assign a keyboard shortcut to inserting a “tag” like you can with markers???
-
Yeah the tag panel is new since 2 releases ago I think. I don’t see how you could assign a keyboard shortcut to a tag panel as you can have an infinite number of panels each with like 30 different tags. I think Adobe tried to make it as easy as possible with just a click–not even a double click. Just tap it and it’s there.
-
Oh ok then, will do. Thanks again.
-
A cool thing I discovered about Prelude is that it does a checksum-like comparison when you ingest cards.
Haven’t worked with it lately, but I think the suggestion was to leave the camera shot file title as is, and add shot names in another field.
Is that right?Robert Withers
Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City
-
I have been using prelude to log headroom footage, as a data base for future editing.
I import all of the H264 clips that have been transferred from the daily card into a folder on my drobo which is my archive. I then import the clips and access from there.
I find however that after making a new bin in prelude it takes ages (minutes) to move any group of the clips into it from another bin.
In PP the moves are nearly instntaneous.
What is prelude doing, how can I speed it up?
Thanks Steve
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up