Video Equivalent to Lightroom?

J

jacob12_1993

Active member
Coming from a photographic background I love the ability to organise my photos, tag, keyword, put them in collections etc. I was wondering if there was a video equivalent of this? I am currently using after effects and premiere pro cs5 to edit and grade my clips but I haven't yet found a good solution for organising the clips. The reason I ask is that I am hopefully going to be travelling for 4.5months shooting out of my backpack to film a documentary. I want a solution for organising the clips the day I shoot them as 4.5months worth of clips will not be what I want to have to sort through on my return :cheesy:

Jake
 
Make sure the time and date are set correctly in your camera and make a note of where you are on certain dates...then just organize your clips by date shot.
 
I use Lightroom for my stills also. Have you at least looked at Adobe Pr's Metadata abilities? They do have a lot of metadata, like FCP built into it. I've not tried bringing across the same footage with metadata from FCP, but your post makes me want to run up and try. I'll report back when I do. Adobe Bridge also appears to be a start, as it handles MOV files but not MXF. :undecided I too have looked around and, correct, FCP 7.0 does/did a great job, but unfortunately it appears to be a dead end moving forward. I've recently been looking at Adobe's "On Location" specifically for it's meta data capability, not so much for it's real time shooting on location. I'm going to try something with it on my next shoot, which is to preload the scripted introductions and songs we are going to shoot, and then match them up in post. It does appear that what you enter into metadata in On Location does move to Pr (which you would expect).

I've found that starting with proper naming conventions, and folder structure is key to the right process, but adding all that rich meta data as FCP allows you to is still a gap that appears to be out there in the Windows world. And Mac world outside FCP's end of life audience.
 
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I just was able to easily bring in FCP footage (MOV) with all the metadata I had added in FCP. So it seems that you should be able to use that on the Windows version of Pr and move the files back and forth with no loss of metadata. Maybe there's a hidden land mine or short coming in there, but my rudimentary effort seemed to be easy enough.
 
jacob12_1993 said:
Coming from a photographic background I love the ability to organise my photos, tag, keyword, put them in collections etc. I was wondering if there was a video equivalent of this? I am currently using after effects and premiere pro cs5 to edit and grade my clips but I haven't yet found a good solution for organising the clips. The reason I ask is that I am hopefully going to be travelling for 4.5months shooting out of my backpack to film a documentary. I want a solution for organising the clips the day I shoot them as 4.5months worth of clips will not be what I want to have to sort through on my return :cheesy:

Jake
Click to expand...

5dMK2 shooter here.

I have my Canon Zoom browser set to download my files to a certain HDD and store them by date.

I also Shoot a taped system for a gig I got and I use Premiere to capture those. Premiere allows you to set up where it will deposit those files.
 
Adobe Bridge seems like the anwer to your problems OP but I haven't
bothered to learn it as I normally organize my captured clips manually by project.
So each project will get its own folder basically.
If you have multiple days/locations of shooting for the same project I guess you could then organize them by location/date in seperate folders.
Again Adobe Bridge has a tonne of features just for this and It comes with all the Adobe Suites.
 
Looking for the same as the OP.
Tried catDV but it won't handle m2ts files.
There seems to be a big hole in the market for this kind of software, i guess all the big players have proprietary software built?
 
Lightroom now has basic video support with the release of LR4. It includes key wording and metadata functions and also basic editing tools
 
I'm also looking to cataloge stuff so that other networked pc's can search footage. Know off the top of your head if LR4 can do that?
 
flambe said:
I'm also looking to cataloge stuff so that other networked pc's can search footage. Know off the top of your head if LR4 can do that?
Click to expand...

I would think if you had the LR catalog on a networked drive then it should be possible, but I can't say for definate

Jake
 
jacob12_1993 said:
Coming from a photographic background I love the ability to organise my photos, tag, keyword, put them in collections etc. I was wondering if there was a video equivalent of this? I am currently using after effects and premiere pro cs5 to edit and grade my clips but I haven't yet found a good solution for organising the clips. The reason I ask is that I am hopefully going to be travelling for 4.5months shooting out of my backpack to film a documentary. I want a solution for organising the clips the day I shoot them as 4.5months worth of clips will not be what I want to have to sort through on my return :cheesy:

Jake
Click to expand...

The upcoming version of LR will have much better support for video files. You can download its public beta version to try for yourself.

Just as Adobe Bridge isn't a good substitute for LR for still images, it's not a solution for video clips that you are asking for. Personally I only use Bridge for batch processing, such as batch renaming etc. Other than batch processing, Windows Explorer can do pretty much everything that I might otherwise want Bridge to do.

To me, at the time, the best way to organize video clips is to use the (proprietary) software that comes with your video cameras. For example, if you shoot with a Canon DSLR such as 7D, Canon EOS Utility can drop all the video clips into the folders of your choice, using the naming conventions you specify. LR v3 can then pick them up along with all the still image files you are going to import.

For the files used by a single project, it's easy to use Premiere Pro CS5 to organize and archive them.
 
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