Logging magic with Adobe Prelude

aWESome by Wes Plate

During my time at Adobe I worked as the Product Manager on Prelude for about 18 months. I traveled the world talking with customers who used or needed to use Prelude as an ingest and logging tool. Prelude is used a lot in large broadcast environments where assistants, producers or journalists are preparing material for an editor. However in my own editing, I didn?t have much reason to use it. Like many one-man-band editors I usually find myself jumping into the cutting before I do too much logging. And Prelude really wants to be used before using Premiere Pro, so if I?m logging and organizing as I?m editing then it usually makes sense to just stay in Premiere Pro.

I recently worked on a project featuring some doctors talking to camera about the facility where they work and the patients they treat. I wanted the ability to easily find different answers as well as different version of the answers given. This meant I really needed to log this material, and this was a perfect chance to employ Prelude. I used Prelude to log this project because because of the powerful way it creates subclips and comment markers. I was able to invest some time in Prelude that paid off nicely in Premiere Pro.

With each clip I watched and listened creating comment markers that started with when the subject started answering and ended with the thought. Prelude makes it much easier to create markers with durations than it is in Premiere Pro. While playing, I was able to type quickly and summarize the answer provided by the interviewee, this text went into the comment marker?s description field. read more...