Develop module Workflow recommendations for editing video files

[jayelevy]

Lightroom Version Number

14.0.1

Operating System

1. macOS 15 Sequoia

I am a long time Lightroom Classic user (>150K images). I recently created a separate library to use for managing and viewing home videos (~2500 individual movie files).

In general, this is working fine. I enjoy the normal DAM aspects of LR for the videos, including key wording, etc.

I’m trying to figure out the best (any) workflow for editing the videos. I don’t have major editing needs. I have a periodic need to split a movie into 2 separate files. My greater need is editing the files to adjust synchronization of audio and video. The older movie files are imported from a tape to digital conversion that was done years ago. The audio and video is out of synch in many of those files. These are easy to fix in an external editor (Davinci Resolve).

This brings me to my question. Does anybody have a recommendation on a workflow that would support an edit of a video file? Obviously, Edit In… is not an option for videos. I don’t think I can edit the original file outside of LR without causing other issues with LR. Correct? Should I be thinking about this another way?

I do want to continue to use LR for DAM aspects.

I realize I could start over. Edit the files that need to be cleaned up and then import anew to LR. I’m hoping to avoid that nuclear approach!!

I welcome any suggestions. Thanks

 

[Conrad Chavez]

Because you’re on a Mac I can suggest what I do (in Windows, I have heard that step 5 doesn’t work reliably):

1. Organize the videos using the same Lightroom Classic tools as photos (using folders, collections, metadata).
2. Use metadata (pick flags, stars, labels) to mark which video files I want to edit in the video application.
3. Filter for the video files I want to edit, such as only the ones I marked as picks.
4. Select those clips, then drag their thumbnails from the Grid or Filmstrip.
5. Drop them into the video editor. I use Adobe Premiere Pro, so I drop them into its Project panel where it manages project assets. This works like Lightroom Classic: It “imports” them by reference by recording the folder path to each image. (I assume it should work similarly in DaVinci Resolve or any other app that properly supports standard macOS drag and drop.)
6. When done editing, if I want to catalog the finished video export, I import that into Lightroom Classic as usual, often using drag and drop again.

 

[johnbeardy]

I do almost exactly the same as Conrad, also using PremierePro. A minor point is that only his step 5 fails to work on Windows, but step 6 does.

The one difference is that I use a plugin (mine) to save the metadata back into the videos, making it available in Premiere Pro's project manager. But that's not critical.

 

[jayelevy]

thanks for the replies. That workflow makes sense. Though, it's not too efficient. I would love to avoid making new copies, editing, re-importing, deleting the original, etc, but I do understand the LR constraints.

BTW, as expected, step 5 works fine with Resolve.

thanks again

 

[Conrad Chavez]

I do almost exactly the same as Conrad, also using PremierePro. A minor point is that only his step 5 fails to work on Windows, but step 6 does.

You’re right, I’m not sure why I included step 6…but I edited my reply to correct that.

That workflow makes sense. Though, it's not too efficient. I would love to avoid making new copies, editing, re-importing, deleting the original, etc, but I do understand the LR constraints.

The parts you want to avoid don’t really have anything to do with Lightroom Classic. You said you’d like to “avoid making new copies” for editing, but that isn’t a concern because it doesn’t happen. Because most video editors and Lightroom Classic track files by path reference, as I said. That means they are not storing files privately but using them where they already are in a regular folder, and it also means each of those apps is working with the same single original set of files. If you drag a video from Lightroom Classic into Resolve, and in each app you select that file and choose the Show in Finder command (I assume Resolve has that), both apps are going to point to the same file on the desktop. (I’m guessing at how Resolve works because I haven’t used it, but most pro video editors work that way.)

It’s common practice, regardless of software, to import original videos, edit them as needed, and export the edited copies. In more professional workflows you have to do it that way because the format and codec of the original clips might need to be different than the format and codec required for the final delivered clips, kind of how with photos we might shoot in raw and export as TIFF or JPEG. So it isn’t typical to replace the original. Even in Apple QuickTime Player, if you use its Trim (edit) feature, it does not default to replacing the original, it defaults to making a copy.

However, if you really want to replace the original video with the edited one, it probably won’t require that many steps. When you’re done editing in Resolve and are ready to export the finished clip, if you export to the same file type, codec, file name, and file name extension as the original and into the original’s folder so that the original is overwritten and replaced, the next time you open a Lightroom Classic catalog containing that video, it should preview and play back the replacement file. Because it will think it successfully found the same file name that was at that path location last time.

Just be aware that doing it that way will probably create a circular reference in Resolve, because if it’s been tracking the path location of the original for use in your Resolve project, and you replaced the original with the edited export, now that Resolve project will probably refer to, preview, and play back the exported edited version, so the existing edits will no longer make sense and you can no longer reverse any edits. If you know at that point that you’re really finished, maybe that’s OK…but a lot of people find that too risky.

 

[jayelevy]

This response is super helpful! I appreciate you taking the time to explain in such detail.