Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 for the Videographer

DMN by Jeremiah Hall

I'm not much of a still photographer; my passion is in motion pictures, not stills. So a couple of years ago I saw Vincent Laforet's "Reverie" I knew that I would have to learn to shoot with a DSLR. I've found the process to be both fun and frustrating, expensive in some areas (priced a matte box lately?) and ridiculously cheap in others (reusable SDHC versus a case of tape).

Which brings us to Adobe Lightroom 4. I have never used the previous versions of Lightroom, since most of my time was taken up with Avid, After Effects and Final Cut Pro. When I needed to do something with stills, I used Photoshop. When I got the chance to try Lightroom 4, I jumped at the chance, but I was more interested in the video capabilities than I was in the photographic features and tools.

Lightroom 4 will not be replacing Premiere or Photoshop, it's not designed for heavy photo or video editing. You can't cut your movie masterpiece with it. But if you're a DSLR shooter, I can see it becoming a very useful tool in your arsenal.

I plugged my Canon T3i into the USB and double-clicked the LR4 icon. It opened, and I found myself looking at a big button on the left-hand side of the screen that said IMPORT. I pressed it. It gave me a choice between drives on the computer or my camera's memory card. I chose the card. A grid of stills popped up for every movie and picture on the card. I could choose individually what I wanted to import. I also had the choice of where I wanted it all imported to. I let it default to the My Pictures folder, where it created a folder called 2013. I set the date on my camera ahead one year. I wanted to see what the software would use - the computer's date or the camera's date). Then it imported the media into a subfolder with the corresponding camera date. It then took me back to the navigator window, where I could start playing with the images and videos. read more...