Review: Adobe Lightroom 5 for DSLR Video Producers
Using Adobe Lightroom 5 to color-grade and apply metadata to DSLR video files is simple and efficient and can benefit live-switchers doing minimal edits, editing novices, and pro editors exploring non-traditional workflows.
At Adobe Max earlier this year, Adobe announced that it was completely dropping development for its Creative Suite software and moving all future users to the relatively new Creative Cloud. This decision has been met with praise, anger, and everything in between. How this move will shape the company and its market position remains to be seen over the next few years, but there are a few changes that are almost universally considered positive.
The Creative Cloud now includes Adobe Lightroom, a product that many video producers might not have considered necessary in the past. If moving to the Creative Cloud is in your future, take a look at some of the video processing found in Lightroom to see if it can fill a gap in your workflow.
If you’re new to Lightroom, you should first understand that it is a photo organizer and editor built with pro photographers with large libraries in mind. Since many still photographers are using DSLRs with HD video capabilities now, Lightroom can also handle these files. However with a product like Adobe Prelude available, is there a reason to consider using Lightroom? Let’s see.
Importing Files into Lightroom
The first thing you’ll notice when importing your video files is that all of the metadata support you’d expect from a professional editor is available to you (Figure 1, below). You can enter all the information manually for individual files, or you can create a metadata preset to be saved and applied to groups of files each time you import footage.
Figure 1. Metadata support for imported files
You can also easily change the preset used on a given file if you mistakenly include an incorrect file when importing (Figure 2, below).
Figure 2. Changing the preset
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