What is Prelude?
Adobe Prelude is designed to be a step between the camera and your editing software of choice. Many cameras shoot in "non-standard formats" (i.e. XDCAM), and it's often preferential to transcode non-standard formats into standard formats like Apple ProRes. Check out our article on codecs for more information on why this step is important.
How to Use Prelude
Starting a Project
- Open Prelude and select "New Project" from the splash screen.
- Save this project to your external hard drive in a new folder.
Transcoding
- Double click in the top left window to ingest your media.
- In the media browser, navigate to your media. You can select multiple clips or folders using the check marks in the bottom right of each icon. Use the "Check All" and "Uncheck All" buttons to make this process easier if you have a high volume of clips.
- Once selected, you have a variety of choices to make on the right hand side of the screen. Check "Transfer Clips to Destination" and "Transcode".
- We recommend unchecking "Add Subfolder" unless you expect to transcode multiple times. That option simply adds a new folder within your destination.
- Make sure that the Format and Preset (codec) are set to the appropriate options. Most of the time, you'll want to choose "QuickTime" and "Apple Prores 422".
- You can add a destination if you'd like to make a backup of the transcoded media. We recommend making a backup to a second external hard drive.
- You can also rename your files at this point, but we do not recommend doing so, as relinking media with different file names can occasionally be problematic.
- Click "Ingest" to begin the process. This will launch Adobe Media Encoder, so if it seems like nothing has happened, double check to ensure that Media Encoder is not open in the background.