Working with videos in Lightroom

[djstett]

Lightroom Version

Lightroom Classic version 12/5 Camera Raw 15.5 (It won't let me copy)

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I'm a video novice. I have Lightroom 12.5 Release and I'm shooting video at 4K - 60p - L-8 with my Olympus OM-1 camera. I chose these settings because they seemed to be mid-range between two other settings. I can import the videos into Lightroom, but the video playback "stutters" and pauses temporarily, often not finishing, instead of displaying smoothly like it does in my camera's playback. The audio plays back correctly even as the video hesitates. The video hesitation reminds me of years ago when downloading video from the internet would surpass the computer's ability to display the video smoothly, resulting in "stuttering" and pausing, similar to what I am seeing in Lightroom. Is my 4k video too much for Lightroom? (The videos from my Samsung Galaxy 23 phone displays just fine.)

My camera instruction book mentions using OM Capture to download directly from my camera. Is that a solution? I currently don't actually edit my videos. I just export them to a computer file and insert them into a PowerPoint presentation. I would prefer getting the videos into Lightroom. Do I need a separate video editing software? I don't really want to go deeply into video editing. I just need to insert videos into photo presentations.

 

[clee01l]

I'm a video novice. I have Lightroom 12.5 Release and I'm shooting video at 4K - 60p - L-8 with my Olympus OM-1 camera. I chose these settings because they seemed to be mid-range between two other settings. I can import the videos into Lightroom, but the video playback "stutters" and pauses temporarily, often not finishing, instead of displaying smoothly like it does in my camera's playback. The audio plays back correctly even as the video hesitates. The video hesitation reminds me of years ago when downloading video from the internet would surpass the computer's ability to display the video smoothly, resulting in "stuttering" and pausing, similar to what I am seeing in Lightroom. Is my 4k video too much for Lightroom? (The videos from my Samsung Galaxy 23 phone displays just fine.)

My camera instruction book mentions using OM Capture to download directly from my camera. Is that a solution? I currently don't actually edit my videos. I just export them to a computer file and insert them into a PowerPoint presentation. I would prefer getting the videos into Lightroom. Do I need a separate video editing software? I don't really want to go deeply into video editing. I just need to insert videos into photo presentations.

You can import videos from the camera card just like you do still photos.
Videos don’t “play well” with Lightroom (Cloudy) but you can easily use the organization features of LrC just like you would with other photos from your Olympus. LrC Editin for videos is basic and minimal. I don’t recommend it. There are dedicated movie editors that are much more efficient in editing movies.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[BobT]

LrC has a trimming feature which is useful but that's about it. That's all I need for the odd family clip. I too have an OM-1. I also use 4K 60p L8, whatever that means. I didn't choose it, it was the default. I import both stills and video from the card in one go without a problem. 4K 60p L8 videos run perfectly in my LrC, so I suspect your system might not be quite up to it.

 

[Jimmsp]

.... I would prefer getting the videos into Lightroom. Do I need a separate video editing software? I don't really want to go deeply into video editing. I just need to insert videos into photo presentations.

I input the "raw" videos into my LR Classic. Most of the videos that I produce also include a lot of stills, so keeping the videos together with the stills has a lot of advantages.
As for video editing software, I recommend that novices start out with the free open source program called OpenShot Video. It is basic , but easy to use and a novice learns some of the basic concepts and editing.
Later, if they get more adventurous, I also tell them to use the more powerful DaVinci Resolve. The basic version is free, and is more than enough for most people.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

4K and 60 fps is very high. That may be part of the reason why Lightroom has difficulty playing them. There is also no reason to use 60 fps, unless you plan to use them a lot of slow motion video. Many people use 24 fps because that is the frame speed of film, and so that is considered ‘cinematic’. I recommend 30 fps because video is not film and 24 Hz fps does not ‘fit’ nicely in the 60 Hz refresh rate of monitors, making scenes with movement go less smooth than the ‘cinematic people’ claim.

 

[Gnits]

I agree completely.

I think there is also a recommendation of the frame rate based on the local frequency of your power supply… ie differences in US, Europe,Asia, etc..

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I agree completely.

I think there is also a recommendation of the frame rate based on the local frequency of your power supply… ie differences in US, Europe,Asia, etc..

Yes, that applies to shooting in artificial light.

 

[johnrellis]

Video has always been LR's stepchild -- an "unfinished" feature added more for marketing purposes. Over the years, LR's problems with stuttering playback have come and gone depending on your computer and the video format, and Adobe provides no support for such issues. Many of us just use LR to catalog our video clips, using other apps to view and edit them.

You can use the Any File plugin's Open command or a similar command in one of John Beardsworth's plugins (can't find it right now) to quickly open a cataloged video in the default player configured for your OS. I've assigned Ctrl O to the Open command, so it's one keystroke to play back a video in Mac Quicktime.

 

[djstett]

From djstett:
I appreciate your replies and expertise. I will likely need to replace my 6-year-old i5 computer in order to work with the videos recorded thus far. I will also reduce the camera's setting of the fps rate to 30 since I don't need the high 60 fps rate. I like the idea of using a video software program and learning some basic skills with video editing in a program that is user-friendly for a novice user.
Thank you all!

 

[johnbeardy]

Try running the video in Windows rather than in LR. Does that make it run smoother?

You know, I wouldn't reduce that frame rate - at least not all the time. Instead, consider the subject and how you might want to edit the video.

If you're just recording someone speaking, how might you want the final video to look? Well, you probably wouldn't want to slow it down or unsync the sound and pictures - so 30 fps would be fine. But then imagine recording something where motion is important, a horse jumping show for example. Again try to think ahead and imagine that you could slow down key bits of action. In that case, you might want to set 60fps in camera. In this clip, I'd set 60fps because I knew I'd want to slow mo.

The same applies to 4k - think ahead to what you may want to do when you edit the video. Staying with 4K would give you more scope to zoom into that speaker when they get to important bits, or zoom in on the horse as it jumps over the water, for example. It might also come in handy any time when you simply can't get close enough, and want to zoom in during the editing.

A couple of other tips, though reflections is probably a better word as I'm no expert on video and filmmaking:

• Consider getting a microphone to sit on the hot shoe. I feel my basic Rode directional microphone makes an enormous difference to what I can do with video, so in this video the sound was done with it and handled the traffic and other extraneous noise. I shot 3 clips that day, only used the video from one, but could use the sound from one of the rejects for the slideshow section.
• Record shorter video clips rather than longer ones. They're easier to manage in LR, you can chuck away the crap bits more easily, and often you won't want to use long clips in the final masterpiece.

Of course, in practice I always forget to switch from HD 1080p to 4K or from 30 to 60fps, and I've usually left the mike at home just when I see something I want to video, so add "in theory" to the above.

 

[Conrad Chavez]

I can import the videos into Lightroom, but the video playback "stutters" and pauses temporarily, often not finishing, instead of displaying smoothly like it does in my camera's playback.…Is my 4k video too much for Lightroom?

4K video playback is generally not a problem for most recent devices including phones, but it can depend on which codec (compressor/decompression method) was used to save the video. Sometimes videos are saved using a codec that isn’t directly supported by a device or application, and will play less smoothly there. If your 4K phone video plays more smoothly than the Olympus video, the two videos might use different codecs and one is not as well supported. Recent CPUs include built-in hardware support for commonly used codecs, so if a particular codec is supported, it plays more smoothly using less CPU power. But applications have to tie into that hardware acceleration.

The way to narrow it down is to see how the video plays back in common video players such as VLC, Adobe Bridge, or the player that comes with Windows. If the video plays back smoothly in those, then the issue is not your computer or the videos, it’s that the video support in Lightroom Classic needs to be improved for that codec. Adobe has updated Lightroom Classic video support in recent years so it’s better than it used to be, but at least on my Mac, videos still do not play as easily in Lightroom Classic as they do in other players.

I catalog camera videos in Lightroom Classic in the same folders as still photos taken on the same camera, just to organize them, but that’s all I do with videos in Lightroom Classic. When I want to edit the videos, or when I just want to view them more smoothly than in Lightroom Classic, I drag them out of the Lightroom Classic grid and drop them directly into the video player/editor I want to use (for example, I drop them into the Project panel in Adobe Premiere Pro). I think I’ve heard that this inter-application drag-and-drop method might not work in Windows, but that’s no problem, you can also right-click a video in Lightroom Classic and choose Show in Explorer to show where the video is on the desktop, and then you import it into your video editing application (or in your case, into PowerPoint) from there.

So although Lightroom Classic might not handle videos very well itself, I still think it’s useful as a staging area to find and pre-organize videos for a project (e.g. in collections), and for making the videos accessible to import into other applications (through drag-and-drop or right-click Show).