As an important research direction in image and video processing, set-based video recognition requires speed and accuracy. However, the existing static modeling methods focus on computational speed but ignore accuracy, whereas the dynamic modeling methods are higher-accuracy but ignore the computational speed. Combining these two types of methods to obtain fast and accurate recognition results remains a challenging problem. Motivated by this, in this study, a novel Manifolds-based Low-Rank Dictionary Pair Learning (MbLRDPL) method was developed for a set-based video recognition/image set classification task. Specifically, each video or image set was first modeled as a covariance matrix or linear subspace, which can be seen as a point on a Riemannian manifold. Second, the proposed MbLRDPL learned discriminative class-specific synthesis and analysis dictionaries by clearly imposing the nuclear norm on the synthesis dictionaries. The experimental results show that our method achieved the best classification accuracy (100%, 72.16%, 95%) on three datasets with the fastest computing time, reducing the errors of state-of-the-art methods (JMLC, DML, CEBSR) by 0.96–75.69%.