Today’s Question: I often capture videos along with still photos, and then use those videos in slideshows. However, when I try to review the videos in Lightroom Classic, the playback is not smooth at all. Is there a way to fix that?
Tim’s Quick Answer: While you can adjust a couple of settings to potentially improve the smoothness of video playback in Lightroom Classic, I’ve often found that the best approach is to simply open the video directly through your operating system from Lightroom Classic. You can do this by right-clicking on the video you want to play and choosing “Show in Explorer” on Windows or “Show in Finder” on Macintosh, and then double-click on the selected video.
More Detail: Lightroom Classic tends to be relatively slow when it comes to playing videos, meaning that if you play a video within Lightroom Classic there’s a chance the playback won’t be smooth. This is especially true for videos with a very high resolution.
It could help to increase the size of the video cache, though in my experience this doesn’t generally provide a real benefit in terms of video playback. You can go to Edit > Preferences on Windows or Lightroom Classic > Preferences on Macintosh, then go to the Performance tab and increase the value for the Maximum Size under Video Cache Settings.
However, a more dependable solution is to simply play videos through your operating system rather than within Lightroom Classic. If you right-click on a video in the grid view display or on the filmstrip you can then select “Show in Explorer” on Windows or “Show in Finder” on Macintosh. This will open a window in your operating system showing the contents of the folder where the video is stored, with the video selected.
You can then double-click on the selected video file to open it in the default video player application, or right click to access the Open With menu to choose which application you want to use.
