Exporting videos as H.264

[steve.guides]

This problem has been happening to me for years. I want to export about 150 videos, some with Lightroom edits, others just changing to the H.264 format in max quality. What happens is that invariably the first video exports ok, and then the programme spends hours doing basically nothing until it either times out or I get bored and cancel the operation. If I try the export again it flashes through the operation but nothing happens at all. The workaround is to close Lightroom, reopen it and repeat. However, doing this 150 times seems pretty inefficient! It seems to be a problem specific with the H.264 converter but what? and why does closing and reopening the programme allow me to export another one only? In case you are wondering,"export original" works fine but lets face it that's a useless setting, why would I want to export the video without any edits? I can just move it in such a case!

[Abambo]

steve.guides  wrote

others just changing to the H.264 format in max quality.

As I have no solution for your problem, as I do not use LR for video editing, I suggest that you do not rerender video files just to change the quality factor to a higher value. This will at the very most create a file taking more disk space but will not result in a higher quality! You need to film at the highest possible quality for getting most out of your data.

[steve.guides]

Sorry but that's not what I meant. I film in very high quality! I want to store all videos as H.264 format. Some files are simply being converted from MOV or other propriety formats.

[Abambo]

That's indeed different.

[Michael J. Hoffman]

Have you considered using Adobe Media Encoder or a similar tool to transcode the files into your target format? Lightroom is hardly designed for this kind of task.

Free Media Encoder CC | Download free Adobe Media Encoder CC trial

This comes with a full CC subscription, but if you have the Photographers plan, you may not have access. You can download a free trial and see if it works for you.

Mike

[steve.guides]

Thanks but I have plenty of media encoders. I want to export from Lightroom: I export all images to one set of image folders and all videos from the same event to a parallel set of folders in a video folder with exactly the same structure. These are on different drives. So the Lightroom export is just a piece of housekeeping that I do after I have imported all my images and videos from a course onto my hard drive. Before doing that though I like to do a very quick trim of any excess stuff at the beginning or end, and just a bit of adjusting if its way too dark. So Lightroom would be ideal if it wouldnt keep freezing after the first export.

[steve.guides]

Sorry to say, but I have experienced exactly the same problem for years. But Adobe neither seem to acknowledge the issue or do anything about it. As you say, why on earth would anybody want to export the original unedited video through Lightroom?

[steve.guides]

It's just a publish issue, which is a shame because I use a macro (jf Folder Publisher) to publish to the same folder structure on a drive for edited versions of images. The Export function  of Lightroom works perfectly well for videos and adds DPX as well. However, I don't know of any macro to export to a matching folder structure. 

[Jao vdL]

I have had the same issue intermittently for years and just gave up on using Lightroom for storing video. The problem seems to be Adobe's dynamiclinkmediaserver background app that hangs up.

I disagree that the export original option is useless. You don't want to manually move files outside of Lightroom as it will lose the link to the files. So "original" is a quick way to make copies of your original files to use in other apps without affecting your Classic Library, especially if you need a bunch of files that are in separate subfolders on your hard disk. Then export original is much faster than trawling though a folder structure on your hard disk.