Handle Videos in Lightroom
LIGHTROOM IS FOR RAW IMAGE WORKFLOW, non-destructive image-editing, and searching, tagging, and organizing. It does those things very well, but there are also some lesser-known tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to deal with video files.
DSLRs have been able to shoot HD video for some time now, and 4K is beginning to make its way into manufacturers’ top-level offerings. Lightroom is capable of working with most common video file formats, though, so whether you’re using a GoPro, an iPhone, or a Canon EOS 1-DX Mark II, it’ll be able to handle the files.
You can import video at the same time as still images, process it in the same app, and organize it into the same folders. However, your options for video are more limited than for editing still photos, because Adobe holds back the advanced features for its dedicated editing apps, such as Premiere Pro. But if you’re not prepared to invest in Premiere, Lightroom does a good job. 1 IMPORT VIDEO Importing your video is achieved in exactly the same way as importing still photos. We’ve got some GoPro footage that we’ve already copied to an external hard drive, so when we import it into Lightroom, we’re going to choose the “Add” option at the top of the “Import” interface. Doing this leaves the files where they are, and adds them to the Lightroom catalog. Life’s too short to wait for gigabytes of video footage to copy over to an internal drive when it’s perfectly happy where it is. If we’d got the camera’s memory card inserted, however, we would use the “Copy” option [ Image A], which would transfer the files to a target drive and into a folder hierarchy we’d previously set up. The “Move” option does the same thing, but deletes the files from the source card as it does so—something that sets our Spider Senses tingling as possibly dangerous. MaximumPC believes in keeping backups. 2 WAIT A BIT… Once you’ve imported your video, Lightroom takes an inordinately large amount of time creating previews. This takes much longer than the same process does with still photos, and you can understand why when you see that you can pass your mouse pointer across each thumbnail in Library view, and see it change as if you were scrubbing through the file. Our quad-core i7 chugged away for ages on this task, and it was only 182GB of footage. Luckily, you can still carry out other tasks while it’s processing. 3 FILTER YOUR LIBRARY If you’ve told Lightroom to slurp the whole content of a memory card on to your hard drive, you can end up with a Library folder that shows both still photos and videos. There’s a simple way to focus on one or the other: a Library Filter. At the top of the interface, you’ll see the initial filter options: Text, Attribute, Metadata, or None. Click “Attribute,” and at the far-right you’ll see a section marked “Kind.” Here you can choose to show Master Photos, Virtual Copies, or Videos. They’re toggle switches, so you can click as many as you like at once, clicking them again to remove them from the filter. Clicking “Video” does exactly what you’d expect: removes anything that’s not a moving picture from your Library view. Click the drop-down menu above these options, and you can make a new filter preset that will make the process faster in the future. 4 LIGHTROOM LIMITATIONS Once you’ve chosen your movie file, double-click it so it opens in the Loupe view. You can’t take videos into the Develop module, which is a real shame—you can try, but all you end up with is a gray screen with a message on it, telling you that you can’t. Instead, you can use the Quick Develop controls just as you would on a photo. There aren’t very many of them, but you can adjust a few things about your video.
5 TRIM YOUR FOOTAGE Lightroom’s ability to trim your videos is a useful one. Before importing into a serious editing application, you can remove the bits where you fiddled with the camera position or shouted at the sound recordist before things started in earnest. As soon as you open a video in the Loupe view, a bar with play controls appears at the bottom. To the right of this is a cogwheel icon that looks as though it should be some sort of settings menu, but it isn’t. Clicking it opens up the trim controls, so you can lop off the beginning and end of your clip. The bar widens to show thumbnails of your clip, and bars appear at either end. Drag these toward the center until only the part you want to keep is unaffected by their gray overlay [ Image B]. Now, when you export your clip, only the part you selected is saved out. The master copy in Lightroom is, of course, untouched, so you can always come back and chop another part out of a clip if you need to. 6 TWEAK THE LOOK Finally, you can use the Quick Develop panel to adjust the look of your clip. You can alter the white balance, the tone of the footage, and use presets [ Image C] to get the look you want. This isn’t color grading or anything a professional would use, but if you want to make the colors in a short clip pop, it gets the job done. You can alter the exposure, vibrance, and contrast of the footage manually, too, although it’s nowhere near as involved as it would be using the Develop module, because you’re using buttons rather than sliders. And, as much as we wished for it, there’s no way of removing a GoPro’s slight fisheye look in Lightroom. This single addition would make the application’s video capabilities a lot more useful!