JPEG workflow for ML RAW video using only Lightroom and Premiere

[Limiter]

I am much more a photographer than a filmmaker. Since RAW capabilities and Magic Lantern, filmmaking became much more interesting to me. Always had problems with all those different video formats, roundtrips, dynamic links, proxies.. And after one little project with Canon H.264 I now really appreciate RAW!!

So here is how I do it:

1.) Convert the RAW to DNG
2.) Import DNG in Lightroom, rough corrections, edits
3.) Export very low quality JPEG's out of Lightroom
4.) Import the JPEG's in Premiere as Sequence
5.) Happy editing in Premiere, good performance on the timeline!
6.) If needed, I can go back to LR for some tweaks, just reexport the JPEG's overwriting the originals, Premiere timeline is automatically updated!

When edit is finished, I export all the JPEG's again from Lightroom, only this time in maximum quality. Back to Premiere -> Render!

Works good for me, please let me know what you think and how it could be done even better.

Here's a video of the workflow, sorry it's german 

[darkstarr]

very nice,

thanks for sharing
im also much more of a photographer.
I think i'll be using the same workflow, this makes much more sense to me.
And I like to pixel peep in LR to make sure everything looks right before exporting to timeline

[glubber]

Nice tutorial.
Good quality, easy to understand and "eine angenehme Stimme" 

After half a year i'm still searching for a raw workflow that fits best to my soft- and hardware.
I use Premiere Elements 10 as NLE and doing colorcorrection with it is nearly impossible.
In contrast using Lightroom for getting the best out of the RAW-files is just so easy.
So creating the proxies with lowres jpegs is a good idea.

[spider]

I use the same workflow just with resolve instead of Premiere and I use HQ jpeg directly.

[dmilligan]

Can't you import the dngs directly to premiere and skip the jpeg step? (I usually use AE and dynamic link to premiere so I haven't tried it, but I thought I read that premiere now supported raw sequences - correct me if I'm wrong). If you turn on the xmp metadata in Lr, premiere should abide your Lr develop settings.

[dude]

You can only import cdngs in premiere cc, other versions like cs6 don t support the import.

[shandor]

I know this is an old topic, but I've been trying several workflows, and this one was very interesting and simple. Working around this workflow I found something interesting.

I like this workflow because I consider Lightroom a very powerful tool to work with raw images, and it has a lot of options regarding color. But my problem was that the final JPG files, even though they were in the highest quality, remained to be 8 bit.

So, after some tries, I found this:

Follow the same workflow, once you have edited your sequence, instead of replacing the low res JPGs with HQ JPGs, export from Lightroom a PSD sequence in 16 bits. Then unlink the low red JPGs in Premiere, and re-link to the PSD.
Happily export to Pro res 4444 @ 16 bits.

This workflow has one more step than the previous one, but still I find it interesting to color correct in LR. You can still go back and forth from Premiere and LR.

[jmanord]

I tried using the Lightroom workflow as well using the following method with Resolve:

1. Auto-Stack and Collapse imported cdng's ( makes browsing in Library much easier, and Shift+Click on the stack selects all the images for pasting the corrections )
2. Edited cdng in the Resolve timeline
3. Corrected the used cdngs in Lightroom
4. Exported to compressed 16 bit tifs ( This is probably overkill, but I thought it best to keep as much info as possible in the event I wanted to do any additional correction in Resolve )
5. Replaced the cdng clips in resolve with the Lightroom graded tifs.

I started writing a script to substitute the cdng clips for the tifs in an exported Resolve .xml file, but on loading the updated .xml, lost the grading on non-cdng sequences. This wouldn't be an issue if you are only using cdngs and correcting every clip in Lightroom. I'm sure there is a workaround, but I actually found I preferred the looks of the cdngs I was correcting in Resolve, and abandoned the Lightroom part of the workflow. I don't do any heavy corrections, but noticed most of the Lightroom tools have corollaries in Resolve. The noted missing tool (in the free version of Resolve) was the Detail Panel, Lens Corrections Panel, and I would get horrible results when attempting to use the Hue vs Lum corrections in resolve.