Adobe Prelude

Creating a professional video montage requires some preparation to avoid confusions in the future. Adobe Prelude was created specifically for this purpose. It allows you to tag and mark your videos before you start working with them in Adobe's Premiere Pro. The software is particularly useful if your projects involve a large amount of footage, which you can lose track of. Its tools can streamline your work in Premiere before it even begins.

Like most Adobe products, Prelude is free to try for 30 days, without any functionality restrictions. Although its setup package is rather large, downloading and installing the program doesn't take too long, especially if you compare the installation process to that of other Adobe programs. Also, Prelude requires less resources.

If you are familiar with Adobe Premiere Pro or other video editors, you will feel right at home with Adobe Prelude. Its user interface has the same modular design, but it also has a simpler layout and less controls. You can import one or more media files, load them in a timeline, preview them, insert markers and perform other operations on separate panels.

Once you import and load a media file, you can add various markers in its timeline. The software allows you to insert subclips, comments, flash cue points, web links, chapters and speech transcriptors. They are all color-coded, to make them easier to spot. Inserted markers are displayed as colored bars along the entire length of the loaded media, but you can resize and move them over the portion you are interested in.

You can type your own titles, comments or descriptions, for a selected marker, on a separate panel. What's more, the software allows you to switch between different view modes. Each view mode will rearrange the panels on the interface, to streamline certain operations, like reviewing markers or editing a rough cut.

Besides saving the project in the program's own format, you can also save the edited metadata or upload it to the cloud. The best part is that Prelude allows you to export your project as a Premiere Pro project or as a Final Cut Pro XML project. In other words, once your media files are imported, marked and tagged, you can start working in Premiere or Final Cut without any further preparations.