Use Lightroom 4 as organizer?

[Watson]

I recently purchased the combo pack of Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10 on a half price special. I really only needed Premiere, but at half price, why not? Unlike a much earlier version I own, the programs seem so integrated that there aren't even separate disks for installation. Elements 10 is a clunkier organizer than Lightroom and I'd rather not use it. Did I remove any other options by buying both programs together?

If one purchases just Premiere Elements 10 alone, what programs can be used for organizing and pre-viewing the files?

[sidd finch]

Greetings and welcome to muvipix.

Premiere elements has no organizing features. Photoshop elements does have an organizer that is pretty good. Light room uses some of the same tecnology as Photoshop elements. I am not sure how well Lightroom and Photoshop Elements interact.

Sidd

[FotoBob]

Since LR3 allowed you to import videos, I have been importing my short video files (usually 5-30 sec.) It allows me to keep all Video/Photos together related to a topic/trip. I just started my first video in Premiere. My intention is to also import those files into LR4. So I would also be interested if anyone has had any experience/suggestions related to this.

[Bob]

Welcome to Muvipix, FotoBob!

Are you using Premiere Elements or Premiere Pro?

The idea of using Lightroom as an organizer for video is interesting. Lightroom has some nice functionality. But, there are issues using it with traditional video editing software. If you use any of the Lightroom feature to trim or modify the video, you must export (which renders and encodes the video). That puts you one generation away from the original before you do any edits in Premiere. And, the choice of export formats is limited. I understand that even if you use "export original" it re-encodes the file. I don't have Lightroom, perhaps you can test this and let us know, but, I don't know whether you can even drag unmodified video files from Lightroom and drop them into a video project in Premiere and just pass the direct link to the original file location like you can using the Organizer that comes with Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements.

At least at this time, it seems to me that Adobe is trying to appeal to the large number of still photographers that have begun shooting video with their DSLR or video capable cameras and don't want to learn a new program to do video editing. Import, trim and apply basic corrections/modifications, publish to final form -- you're done. Photoshop CS6 also added basic video editing capability, probably for the same reason. The new video editing in Photoshop is more capable with the ability at have multiple video layers among other things, but still rudimentary compared to a dedicated video editing application. You would think you could send a video to Photoshop, but that's not currently possible.

I'm sure we are going to see continued changes in Lightroom to accomodate video workflows. But, Adobe's direction is a bit murky. For now, we'll just have to wait and see.