Premiere Pro CC/Prelude keyword tagging capabilities

[David Roth weiss]

Moving to FCP X in the middle of a project simply because of it’s database functionality would NOT be a wise choice for you in my opinion. With Prelude and Premiere, or simply with Premiere on its own, you’ll have plenty of organizational tools for documentary work. If you move to X, you’ll have to learn an entirely different way of working, which will take lots of your time and brainpower, and that will negate any advantage you might get from database functionality. On the other hand, moving from FCP 7 to Premiere is a piece of cake.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Mabel Valdiviezo]

Thank you for your insight, David.
Definitely not looking to migrate to FCPX but rather FCP7 to Premiere.
What I would like to know is about the keyword, tagging, search bins features within Premiere and Prelude. Anyone with feedback on that? Perhaps someone who has done this for documentaries that have tons of footage and needed to find the footage rather efficiently and quickly?

Thank you!

Mabel Valdiviezo
Editor

[Andrew Kimery]

I haven’t used Prelude but I just add keywords in PPro. The Search Bin feature in CC 2015 is way better than the version in CC2014 and so far I’m really enjoying using it. I wish you could choose more fields to search from (including custom fields) and that it had full Boolean search support (right now you can choose “and” and “or” but “not” is not an option), but it’s much improved even though I don’t remember Adobe saying much about the updates (which is a shame).

Also, and this seems to be a bug, if you are using sequences not all of the searchable fields work. For example, keywords in the “Description” column seem to be ignored but keywords in the “Comment” column are found so I’ve been putting all my keywords in the Comment column when using sequences (and I typically like to work from sequences as opposed to loose clips). I’ve got many interviews in many locations and I’ve used keywords so they will appear in different sort bins. For example, one bin might be “Montana” so every interview I did in Montana shows up there where as another bin might be “Bob” so every interview I did with Bob, regardless of location, shows up there.

This is my first project using the Search Bin feature so I’m still figuring out it’s strengths and limitations.

[Mabel Valdiviezo]

Thank you, Andrew for your notes and feedback. Very appreciated.

Mabel Valdiviezo
Editor

[Jay Moss]

I did a bit of testing with Prelude>Premier as a way of building a searchable library of some of archive material. I had really high hopes that it would be a godsend when tagging/sub-clipping large amounts of footage. Unfortunately, in my experience Prelude was buggy and doesn’t integrate particularly well with the search function of Premiere. For example if I made several sub-clips from one long shot, and gave each a separate tag, then sent those sub-clips to Premier and searched for one of those tags; all of the sub-clips (even those that were not tagged with that word) were returned, as they were all part of the same main clip; basically making it useless.

To be honest, Premiere’s logging and tagging functions are fairly robust, and it’s what I have been using with no real problems since I first started using it. Speed would be greatly improved however, with the addition of tag templates, like in Prelude. But I honestly expect that this functionality will be added to Premier in a later version (along with the couple of useful features that make Prelude an interesting idea) and that Prelude will just be faded out. I can’t personally see a reason for it to be a stand alone application at all.

You should of course do some testing and see how you get on with Prelude, but I find that a combination of correctly labeled/organised bins and a coherent system of markers/tags means I can be as organised as I need to be in premiere, even on large projects.

Best,

J

[Kimberly Reed]

Thanks for the helpful info, Andrew! When you enter multiple keywords in the Comments field, do you separate them with a comma? I’m wondering how commas, or other punctuation, affects the search results. Thanks! Kim

[Phil Lichti]

Hey Jay,

A workaround for the issue of all subclips created from master showing when only one of those subclip matches is to edit the search bin to return only results from “Name” field. I do all my subclipping in Prelude so when I figured out that workaround, it saved me a ton of sorting.

P.