9 Working with Video
How-To: Making a Color Change Animation
Working with Video
Photoshop is a great introductory application when it comes to producing video content, starting with a Timeline panel that reflects dedicated video editors like Adobe Premiere, including transitions and effects that give finished videos a professional polish. Ps takes the intimidating task of video creation and simplifies it with tools and techniques that you are already familiar with from image editing, including multi-layer compositing.
Photoshop supports the most common video and audio file formats including MOV and MP4 video, and MP3 and AAC audio formats, amongst a number of others.
Video Timeline
The Video Timeline has a number of sections that you will want to learn in order to easily work with video. Figure 8.1 highlights each sections..
- Playback: These buttons are used for video playback. You can navigate forwards and backward a single frame at a time, go to the first frame, split a clip, and add transitions.
- Playhead: The Playhead is used to scrub forward and back through a clip by clicking on the blue arrow at the top. You can also click along the line to jump the Playhead to that frame. Hovering the cursor over the blue arrow will reveal the frame location based on the total Frames Per Second.
- Video Groups and Keyframe Effects: Use this section to organize video groups in the Timeline and add effects with Keyframes.
- Timeline: The Timeline is where the video clips are organized.
- Time Marker: This section will allow you to see the time marker that can also be used to scrub the Playhead by click + dragging on the time marker. A video can be converted to a Frame Animation, Render a video and view the Frame Rate.
- Timeline Magnifier: Use this slider to increase or decrease the size of clips to view and edit them easier.
- Video Group Layers: The Layers panel can also be used to organize clips and video groups.
| Playback Options | |
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| Video Group and Keyframe Effect Options | |
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| Timeline Options | |
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Saving Video Files [PSD]
Video files are similar to saving composite images in that they save to the .PSD format during editing, however, it is very important to understand that you are working with proxies of the original video clips that you open in Photoshop. This means that you are not working on the original video file, but rather a duplicate of it which helps the video preview and save faster, while keeping the file sizes down. The easiest way to think about this is to compare it to working with a Preview of an original RAW file in Lightroom. When working in Lightroom you are viewing a preview of the original RAW file and not directly on it, so if you were to rename or move a file outside of Lr you would essentially break the connection and you would receive a message that the file is missing. It is the same with video in Photoshop, your video is linked to Ps so when you save your file as a .PSD [default] it contains the proxy but not the or