Video

There are several ways to work with video and audio clips in Photoshop. If I want to add an individual clip, I can open that clip through Photoshop using the File > Open command. But since I want to work with multiple clips, I'm going to choose to browse in Bridge instead. And then I'll select the first three video clips here. And select Tools > Photoshop and then load these files into a single Photoshop document as their own individual layers. As Photoshop loads those clips as video layers, we can see that it automatically displays the Timeline panel that had been collapsed down in the lower left. If the Timeline panel isn't showing, select the Window menu and choose Timeline.

The only drawback to adding multiple video clips to Photoshop in this manner is that Photoshop simply adds them as individual layers. And we can see that over here on the Layers panel. And we can also see that its added the individual layers on the timeline. But if I want to work with video clips, I probably want them sequenced. I want to see one right after the next. I don't want to see them all stacked on top of each other. So, using the Timeline panel, or using the Layers panel, I'll hold down the Ctrl key and I'll just click on each one of these video layers. An then I'll click an hold, on the icon here, of the film strip so that I can select new video group from clips.

What Photoshop has just done is it's actually made a video group layer, an we can see that on the Layers panel. I'll use the disclosure triangle so we can see, that it's put all three of these video clips into this group. And because their in a group, Photoshop will then sequence them. So we're only seeing the first clip here. But if I use my Zoom In and Zoom Out slider, I can zoom out and we can now see that each one of these clips is sequenced one after another. Now, all of these clips were recorded on my Digital SLR and it recorded audio at the same time, but the audio I have to admit is terrible. So the first thing that were going to do is were actually going to Mute the audio in each one of these clips.
So, over on the right hand side of each clip, there is an arrow. If we click on that, we have options not only for video, but also for audio. So, if we click on the little notes, now I can choose to mute my audio. And I need to do that for each clip individually. So, again, I'll click on the rightward pointing arrow. And then choose Audio and Mute. And on the last one, click Audio and then Mute again. In order to automatically close any of the pop-up windows that come up, we can tap Enter or Return.
Now, my current time indicator or my time insertion marker is at the beginning of my timeline. And you'll notice that you can click and drag in order to scrub through your video. Or we can tap the Spacebar or click on the Play icon if we want to play the video. Now this first piece of video, you can see that it has that black thumbnail. So, there's an extra frame of pure black at the beginning, and we are going to learn to trim that as well as trim the other clips. But now, we have a good idea of what is in each clip.
So, I'll tap the Spacebar again in order to stop it. And then I'll click on this first icon in order to move back to the beginning of the clip. There are a variety of different ways to trim a clip in Photoshop. But I think the easiest way is to position your cursor at the beginning of the clip. And then as you mouse down, Photoshop will pop a screen showing you a small preview. And as you move your cursor over to the left, you can select your new end point. So, I"ll just drag it over a bit, release the mouse and that will set my new end point. You'll notice that Photoshop automatically closed the gap, so it moved all of the other clips over to the left so that there wasn't a blank spot in my sequence.
Now, let's move to the second clip, the pool clip, and I want to trim the out point here, so I'll click at the right side of the clip and then just click and drag. And in the upper right of that pop up window, you can see that I can monitor the duration of this individual clip. So I'm going to scoot it over to about five seconds. And then release my cursor. Now we can also trim our clips numerically. So in the mud clip, the last one, I'm going to use the pop up menu by clicking on the triangle. And then I'm going to enter in a duration of five seconds as opposed to initial 10 seconds.
One interesting thing to point out here is that you might have noticed, you can also change the speed of your clip. So you can slow down your clip or you can speed up your clip. In order to dismiss that dialogue, I'll tap Enter or Return. Now I would like to add some additional effects between each one of these clips. I don't want a straight cut, instead I would like the videos to fade from one to another. I also want to add a fade at the beginning and at the end. So, I'll click on this icon here in order to apply one of these different fades.
If I want to cross fade, i simply click on that and then drag it over the end of the first clip and the beginning of the second clip and release my mouse. You can see that because I'm choosing to fade from one video to another. The length of the video, the entire sequence, was shortened a little bit, because we need to overlap those two clips during the fade. I'll add another cross fade between the second and the third clip, and then I can choose if I want to fade from black or white or with a color.
In this case, I'll fade with black so that my video will start black and then fade up to the first video clip. And I'll do the same at the end, I'll get that nice fade. If I wanted to change the duration of the fade. Notice when I position my cursor on top of the icon that designates that there is a fade there. I get a little grabber handle and I can click and just drag in order to change the duration of that fade. I can also use the contact sensitive menu. So, on the Mac I would Ctrl click or on Windows I can right mouse click, and then I can change my duration in here. So, let's change that back to one second.
You'll notice that I can also change the actual transition if I want to change my mind, and I can delete it. I'll tap Enter or Return in order to hide that. And now let's click the Play icon again. You can see that we faded that from black. And then we're going to fade between the first clip and the second clip. And then again between the second and the third. And finally, at the end, we will fade to black. Excellent. Now I would like to add some audio to this. So I'll click on the notes icon here and add some audio.
We'll navigate to the video folder and double click on the MP3 file. Now, this is a very long song, and I need to trim it down. But I can't trim it on the right hand side here, because I can't see the end of the clip. So, the easiest thing to do is just move the slider to the left here, so that we zoom out. And then position your cursor at the end of the audio clip, and then just drag all the way back here so that it is underneath the three video layers. Now we'll zoom in on there using our slider again.
And you'll notice that I can no longer see the front of my sequence. So, if I need to, I can use the scroll bar here at the bottom. Now we'll return back to the beginning of the timeline by clicking on the icon. And then either tap the Spacebar or click on the Play icon (MUSIC). (MUSIC). Now if I want to fade the audio out at the end, if I click on the right pointing arrow here.
You can see that I can choose to fade in and fade out and I'll add a fade out of just maybe one second. Again, tap Return or Enter in order to dismiss that pop up. Okay, to return to the beginning of our timeline we can either click right here at the beginning of the timeline. Or of course we can click on this icon here, the one furthers to the left takes us to the start of the timeline. And I also want to zoom out, so Cmd+- or Ctrl+- on Windows so that I can see the entire video and then I'll tap the Spacebar or click the Play icon. (MUSIC) I can also see that at the end of my timeline, can you see that these actually aren't quite aligned.
So, I'm cutting my audio track a little bit early. If I want those to match, I can just click and drag those out. Of course, I can also zoom out a little bit, and then click and drag this beyond if I want the audio to play beyond the video and fade out after the video fades. So, you can make all sorts of adjustments here, but when we're finished, we'll want to render the video and audio. So, under the File menu, I can select Export, and then Render Video. So, I'll go ahead and name this video, and I'll go ahead and name it Hot Springs.
And I'll go ahead and choose to save it to the same folder that the original video is in. I don't need to save it to the same folder, but in this case I will. And then I can choose all of my different format and compression settings. So I'm going to use the Adobe Media Encoder. I could also export this as an image sequence if I wanted to take an animation or a video over to maybe After Effects to work on it. For format I'll select the H264. And for the preset let's scroll down and select the Vimeo preset. I know that these are 720P.
They're not at 29.97 frames, though. They're actually at 15, so we'll enter that in there. Of course, if I didn't want them this large or if I wanted to create my own settings, I can do that by just typing in the values. If you happen to have some still images and some video images. Those still images might be in a different color space. So if you want to bring your entire project into the sRGB color space, then you would want to make sure that you leave on this option to color manage. Excellent. I want to render out all of the frames, so I will click Render and Photoshop will render that movie. As soon as it's done exporting I can return to the finder where i saved this movie.
Here it is and we can double click and then play it. (MUSIC) . (MUSIC) Okay, let's return back to Photoshop. Just because we exported the video that doesn't mean that we actually saved this project or this document. So, I'll select File, and then Save as, and we'll save this as Hot Springs again. And I'm going to save it into that same video folder. Now, when I exported and rendered the video, it saved out an mp4, right now I'm saving a .psd file.
And I want to make sure that I save all of my layers. I'll click OK, and then let's return to the finder. You can see here, here is the video, the mp4, which is about 9 Megs. Here is the Photoshop file, the PSD file, and it is about 8 megs. The important thing that I want to point out is that this PSD file, it has pointers to your audio file and your other idea files. So these video clips and this audio clip, they are not embedded in the PSD file.
That's why sometimes you'll have really large video clips, but the Photoshop document will be quite small. So, do not throw away your source video or audio clips, because Photoshop needs those. It's just built a document that actually points to them. So there you have it, a brief introduction to working with video in Photoshop.