major problems with Prelude...

N

Nicholas Natteau

Veteran
I was considering using Prelude to help me manage the vast amount of video clips I will be using in a long form project. But having done a test with only a limited number of clips (less than 30), I'm already seeing major problems and shortcomings with Prelude:

• No way to have thumbnail display in the Project window. Only list view available. That alone seems like a tremendous shortcoming. Why is it that Premiere's Project panel window can show thumbnails but not the project panel window in Prelude? This makes no sense. Especially since Prelude was designed as a program to view and organize your footage. And in Prelude, you have to double click to open each clip.

• For some reason, when I call up a clip (not all), all my bins open up in Prelude's project window, not just the one in which that clip is located. Is this a bug?

Someone else wrote an interesting piece about Prelude's shortcomings:

http://blog.surrealroad.com/archives/2012/the-many-problems-with-prelude/

So I've resigned myself to leaving Prelude alone for now. Hopefully Adobe updates this program and at least gives us thumbnail previews in the next update.

I'll be sticking with the Premiere Pro's project window. The only problem I've noticed there is that when I type any word to search for a certain clip in PP's project window, there's a substantial delay before the word gets typed out, even with a small list of only 30 clips. Has anyone else encountered these issues in PP's project window with delayed typing?
 
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I found the same issues.

The only thing I use Prelude for at the moment is transcoding lots of files, usually to multiple formats, although even here it's not as efficient as it could be, queuing each format separately instead of telling Media encoder to output multiple formats in a single job (which is faster).
 
Thanks to both of you. Jim, what do you suppose the issue could be? I just realized that my Mac Pro desktop has 4 GB of RAM. Could this be the issue causing the delay? How much RAM does Premiere Pro CS 6 need?
 
I've just switched to CS6 Production Premium package from FCP7. I'm using Prelude to ingest footage from my GH2. So far, I've both used it to transcode to ProRes, and also to fully copy the native AVCHD files and structure. I like it, but it definitely needs some work. The very first thing that I noticed that I needed when in the ingest window was timecode. For one particular job, I have someone speaking on camera for a couple of minutes. Each time I start a new clip while shooting, it is a different segment that will be its own video after post. But when the speaker messes up, I just stick my hand in front of the lens and write down the time that the new good take begins. So the last one I write is where I want to begin transcoding. I can't do that as is.

But I've decided for now that it takes up less harddrive space to just move the whole AVCHD structure (including bad takes), rather than just encode the good takes to ProRes. So I click the box to copy to harddrive, rename the clips as needed, mark the correct in points, then send to Premiere. There's a couple of steps there that I haven't actually tried yet, but I think this will be my workflow for this particular weekly job. For larger jobs that I take my time with, I'll just encode the entire clips to ProRes (without trimming any before the ingest) and also copy the file structure just using my regular file management application, just in case it doesn't correctly encode a file.

As far as RAM, I just upgraded from 4 GB to 16 GB in my iMac. It was within a couple of days after buying CS6, so I can't really say if there was an improvement on single application performance. But I can definitely tell that it improved using more than one hefty application, like Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop all at the same time. I only have an i3 in this machine. It was only about $100 for the 16 GB. I figure the type that your Mac Pro will need should be around the same price most likely. It was a worthwhile upgrade. I bought directly from Crucial's website. They even have a tool where you can select your exact model Mac and it will show you what you can buy. Then I checked out with Paypal. Very easy.
 
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