You may not have heard that Adobe is putting their metadata ingest, logging and rough cuts app Adobe Prelude out to pasture. From Adobe: “Effective September 8, 2021, Prelude will no longer be available on Adobe.com.” If you are not shocked by this then that’s okay. If you didn’t even know Prelude existed then that is okay too. Not many people used it.

The little app looked like it had promise when it was teased back in 2012 and I actually used it a bit here and there over the years when ingesting on set. But it didn’t get a lot of development over the years and frankly, I could do most of what I wanted to do with it in Premiere and often do it faster.

We may never know why Prelude seemed to wither on the vine but it did and in just under a month it will be gone. If you do use it you can keep on using it and Adobe will support it for another three years. Curiously, in the Prelude End of life webpage, Adobe says this under Why is Adobe discontinuing Prelude:

 In 2012, we launched Prelude as a dedicated video pre-production tool to prepare media for editorial in Premiere Pro. In that time, we have taken learnings from Prelude and shifted our development focus towards streamlining pre-production workflows in Premiere Pro.

The emphasis there is mine as I’m intrigued as to what pre-production workflows might be coming to Premiere. As of now there really aren’t any unless you count the Media Browser and tossing files into Media Encoder.

Maybe they’ll add something like this:

I’d love to see Prelude’s subclip markers in Premiere Pro.

— Wes Plate (@wplate) August 11, 2021

Time will tell.

Oh yes, Adobe Bridge

Adobe does still offer Bridge. What is Bridge you ask? It’s an asset manager from Adobe that’s been around for ages.

While Bridge can work with video files I think it’s most associated with still images. Bridge has been around a lot longer than Prelude and it doesn’t seem like it’s gotten a lot of video-oriented love over the years either. But in 2020 Adobe did target video in a minor update. I say minor as it didn’t look that different but to be honest I don’t use Bridge very often. I doubt Bridge will go anywhere so if you wanted to bring it into your workflow and go all in you’re probably safe.

And then there’s Kyno

For my money, the one-stop-shop for video work, clip viewing, batch renaming, transcoding, organizing files and adding metadata has long been Lesspain Software’s Kyno. I call it a Finder/Explorer replacement for video and it’s almost always a stop in Kyno as I organize media for an edit and move that media into the NLE to begin cutting. Honestly, it doesn’t feel like there is a need in the world for Prelude or Bridge when you have Kyno. It’s that good.

Except…

Kyno was purchased by Signiant and it feels like the future of Kyno is uncertain which makes me want to cry. My love of Kyno is no secret so after the purchase, there was a time of uncertainty as you couldn’t purchase new licenses of Kyno and existing customers had trouble downloading the product.

And they never answered my tweets.

Just tweeting this again… what’s going on here @Signiant … I had someone who today wanted to buy a copy of @lesspainsoft Kyno but can’t since the acquisition. I sure hope Signiant doesn’t screw up one of the single best video and post-production tools out there. I’m worried. https://t.co/GvveduvxwL

— Scott Simmons (@editblog) March 25, 2021

Thankfully it seems you can now buy Kyno just like always so that’s good. But there hasn’t been a Kyno update in quite a while. I do hope that isn’t foreshadowing anything bad.

Could Hedge come to the rescue?

Here’s my pitch if Kyno goes EOL or gets relegated to some tool only for Signiant customers.

The makers of Hedge recently acquired Divergent Media and their product EditReady. EditReady is a simple and fast transcoding app that can also add metadata. It already does part of what Kyno does. Add some better metadata tools, better and faster ways to browse media, some renaming options and you suddenly have another powerful media management tool.