Catalyst Production Suite

Catalyst Production Suite offers a good amount of video editing tools, as well as the means of preparing your materials for editing. The package includes a highly efficient manager for video files and a powerful and modern editor, which enables you to cut your videos, join them with others and create professional-looking montages. If you have a Sony-made camera, these programs will help you unload your footage, prepare it and process it much faster and easier.

Both programs can be installed in a single run, from a single setup package. They are free to try for 15 days and you can have them up and running in a few minutes. The installation process doesn't involve any complex configurations and you don't have to meet any special requirements.

Catalyst Production Suite's components are Catalyst Prepare and Catalyst Edit. Prepare is essentially an advanced file browser, with a Windows Explorer-like layout. It comes with a wide range of useful features, for organizing video files, making visual adjustments and transcoding them. A lighter version of Catalyst Prepare is available for free and if you are interested, you can find it here, along with a full review.

Catalyst Edit looks and feels like most video editors on the market and it provides the same kind of functionality. Its user interface consists of a file browser, a multi-track timeline editor and an embedded player, for production previewing. The interesting part is that you can also preview individual videos, in the file browser, without the aid of a player. You can just select one, click a Play button and preview the video directly on its thumbnail.

The file browser can be replaced with a plug-ins library. The available plug-ins are basically special effects, which can be added to the current production. What's more, each effect can be tweaked in various ways, through a series of sliders and other simple controls, which show up on the right side of the interface, once you add an effect.

Everything, from importing videos from a camera to creating a professional-looking montage, can be done much faster and easier with Catalyst Production Suite.