Catalyst Prepare

Designed for video production when it comes to 4K, RAW and HD movies, Catalyst Prepare is a Windows and Mac tool packed in a clean and stylish interface, providing casual users with advanced, yet intuitive settings for making adjustments to their favorite clips and preparing them for online publishing.

Part of the Catalyst Production Suite, the program can be installed as a separate component while leaving out Catalyst Edit. To be able to set it up, you must sign up for a (free) account on the developer's website.

The app's window has a modern look with a dark theme, and it's split into two primary areas: for organizing files and for making the edits. The organizer has a built-in file browser that you can use to put together a library of videos you want to apply modifications to.

The main event takes place in the edit tab, where you can make changes to one video at a time. You can import EDL, apply color presets or ASC-DL, reset color adjustments to default, mark the beginning and end for cutouts (creating subclips), as well as capture snapshots.

Various media information can be examined, such as the video codec, profile and level, color sampling, field order, frame rate, bit rate, frame size and count, width, and height. The image can be flipped vertically or horizontally, and you can also enable anamorphic stretch.

Additional settings become available in the options panel, where you can pick the grade in, video processing device, default transcode format, app to use for opening GPS links, along with snapshots location and filetype.

Once editing is over, the clips can be uploaded to Sony Ci or YouTube as well as saved offline in a preferred format. In this case, you can also control the render reset, crop type, encode mode, output color space, timecode, and other properties.

The tool took a heavy toll on GPU during our tests. Other than that, Catalyst Prepare is easy to use, ideal for those interested in quick video edits.