Is there a "Lightroom for Video" product?

Question

I'm doing photography, audio recording, and video just for fun. I have a full Creative Cloud subscription. I mention this to help clarify my fundamental objectives and very limited perspective and experience.

It appears to me as if folks consider video more "one time use" than still photographs in that there are things that help a work flow for a project. But my main concern right now is just keeping track of things. And this is where "Lightroom for Video" idea comes from.

LR allows me to add tags. Tweak the original. Create virtual copies and tweak them uniquely. Group photos into "collections" (in addition to the underlying file system / folder structure). And it even allows me to geotag them now so I can find them by location. I'm assuming that I will find these features useful for videos as I shoot more and more.

I can add the videos to LR and I can do some of these features but its clear that LR really isn't happy. I'm not sure why but the performance was rather horrid after ingesting 500G of videos last weekend. It seems, perhaps, to have recovered by now.

The basic question is: what is the closest thing to LR for videos that you know of given what I view as LRs features above. For example, it would be neat if I could create a "virtual" copy and add in and out points. Indeed, it would be nice if there was a way to catalog Premiere sequences so I could quickly find and re-use them. Honestly, my desires extend to Audition as well so I could take a waveform, make a copy and apply destructive "process" to it, but still keep it "with" the original and properly tagged so I can find it, understand what I did with it, and re-use it or at least use it as a starting point later on.

I see that Adobe has "Prelude" but light surfing says that its not intended for one-man shops but more for work flows involving lots of people. But, it appears to have some features for "ingest" that Premiere does not have.

Edit:

I am using Adobe Premiere and their other products. As I mentioned, I have a full CC subscription.

Perhaps I'm missing something but I don't see how I can search metadata or even easily "see" things like sequences of other projects. I can keep track of things via the file system but that level of "keeping" track is rather primitive.

An analogy is email. Originally, I kept track of email via folders and I had to hunt and search for things. Now, with all the search tools at my finger tips (e.g. Apple's Spotlight or Google's GMail search) I can search and find things instantly.

Also... there are times when copies are made... in particular Audition has destructive "process"es that alter the copy it is working on so if you want the original, the user must make a copy first.

Answer 1

Short answer, there is not really any "Lightroom" for video. But there are non linear editing programs out there that do all the things you want to do with your footage. So, as someone else said here, you want to start using Premiere or some other editing program.

Learn how to organize your projects professionally. You're never going to make duplicates of files (except in some circumstances), but you are going to create duplicates of edits, string-outs, sequences, clips, etc.

So, here's a typical project organization, inside Premiere in this instance (make a clean version of this project, call it "Default", and simply open it and save it with another name each you work on a new project; that way you don't have to re-create all those folders all the time):

And here's an example of drive organization:

Answer 2

I think the closest thing to what you are talking about is Adobe Prelude. It's custom built for content ingestion, logging and metadata of video content.

Depending on how many people are involved in your workflow and how much time you have budgeted, this could be a helpful part of your workflow. However, if you're a one-man shop, you might need to adjust your expectations of how long tagging and sorting video content will take.