by Gavin Seim: With the new LR4 beta now out, I’ve of course been poking around inside. One great feature for us that capture video, is the ability to play and do light edits via Quick Develop and build video clips into our LR workflow.

But there’s something more that you may have noticed. Initially just basic settings are shown available for video, as we can see on the left. Exposure, contrast and the like. Others get greyed out. Also when you attempt to go into the Develop module for more advanced edits, it simply says “Video is not supported in Develop.”

And yet, it seems we can use some Develop settings via presets. I decided to just run a few from Seim Effects presets and see what happened. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the dialog below and that while not all, many of the develop settings are actually available using presets. Settings I was able to apply and export on my clip.

Needless to say I was pretty excited. I didn’t see this shown at the Adobe press conference a few weeks back and as far as I know Adobe has announced no official develop module support for video. But it stands to reason it may be coming.

The Technique for right now is to make Develop presets on a still frame and then apply those settings to video. We can tweak color channels, curves and the like and really gain a great deal of control over video clips in very short order. It’s not perfect: There’s still some settings missing that would be valuable, but we’re off to a good start.

I’m rather excited at the workflow potential. And that I’ll be able to offer presets that can be used for video editing. We’ll see what happens. I plan to experiment further and post some free video presets soon on my blog.. G