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Three features that would make Adobe Bridge useful for video review

In the video world Adobe Bridge tends to be under-appreciated. It’s true, that it was mostly designed to work with stills and assets for web development or desktop publishing. But it does have some rudimentary video preview options that most people are unaware of.

First, there is a possibility to play the video files. After clicking a video file, you will see a little playback control appear in the preview area. The control however is very basic, and makes it really hard to navigate to a specific frame, or to do anything sensible with it, for that matter

Secondly – there is an option to group pictures into so-called stacks, and set the frame rate at which the stack will be played. Simply select the whole image sequence, press ctrl/cmd+g, and voila! The stills will disappear and the thumbnail will change, giving you the possibility to see how many frames there are (upper left corner), and to play it back (the icon and slider above). The frame rate can be set by going to Stacks->Frame Rate and selecting the proper number.

Unfortunately, you can’t play the sequence in the preview area, only in the thumbnail area – I have no idea why.

I have three ideas that would make Adobe Bridge into a sensible video review tool.

  1. Frame by frame playback for video files in full screen mode using simple keystrokes.
  2. Video scrubbing like in Premiere Pro CS6.
  3. Possibility to add markers and comments for a given frame or a number of frames, which later on would be read by Prelude, Premiere, After Effects and other Adobe applications. Similar functionality was present in Adobe Clip Notes and  later in Adobe CS Review that was discontinued in April 2012. I guess it is coming back in another form to Creative Cloud, but right now we’re left in a void.

And come to think of it – why only markers? Why not set an in-point and an out-point as well? And integrate with Adobe Anywhere? Huh?

For those who are interested in supporting my ideas, here’s the link to the idea on the photoshop.com, where you can vote it up, so that people in Adobe community notice it.

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3 Responses to Three features that would make Adobe Bridge useful for video review

  1. Strypes says:

    With Premiere Pro’s inability to efficiently share bins, an asset management tool for PPro project files and media can be very useful. So to add to that list, a cataloging/database tool with good search functions, smart folders, and to be able to consolidate media into a bin object (or XML of bin) so PPro can import them. Also the ability to import/export sequences via XML (for faster sharing of sequences), and the ability to preview a sequence as a clip.

    I tried looking at Bridge as an asset management tool (eg. Final Cut Server, Cat DV, etc) and I was quite disappointed by what i saw and quickly figured it was probably something or photographers, not video post.

    Not sure if Bridge is ever going to be a video tool but we need an asset management software.

  2. ocube says:

    Have you guys looked Adobe Prelude? Seems to do all you guys are talking about… Tried it once, seemed good enough.

  3. BartW says:

    Thanks ocube, but Prelude does not work with the actual filesystem. You have to import files to it, you can’t manage the files directly.

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