2.1 Importing Video Files

Hello everybody and welcome back to video editing in Photoshop. This is lesson 2.1 where we talk about how to import videos into the program, and we explore the video editing interface. So I've got Photoshop open here, and I don't have any files open within it. It's just the empty work space. The first thing that I want to do is change my work space from essentials to motion. Now you can see about the only thing that really changes there is this addition of the time line panel down here. And everything else is very similar to the essentials workspace. So, really, if you wanted to, you could just add a timeline by going to the window menu and selecting the timeline to make sure that it's present. Now you'll usually, you will want the timeline to be on the bottom of the screen, or if you have a secondary monitor you might want to put it over on the other monitor. But generally the time line should be horizontal because you'll end up scrubbing through the time left and right as opposed to up and down. Now these other panels over here, I'm just going to sort of collapse them so I've got more visibility within my layers panel. You don't need to do that, but because of my capture window, I like to have as much space within my layers panel as I possibly can. So other than the addition of the timeline window, things are looking pretty normal. So let's talk about different ways of getting video files open within Photoshop. There's actually several different ways to do it and I'm gonna go through many of them here. The course files for this lesson contains four videos that we're going to work with through this project. The most simplest and direct way of opening one of these videos in Photoshop is just to drag it right in. And that opens up directly here within the Photoshop work space. There's other ways of adding videos to it as well. You could go to Layer > Video Layers > New Video Layer From File, and then you could select a video this way, and hit Open. Now you don't see it here, because it added it to this video group over here on the right. It is now Layer 2 that's that second video that we opened. One of the benefits of opening it directly by dragging it in or by going to the file open, which is really the same method as dragging in onto the work space is that when it creates a new file it'll match the size of the video you opened. Using the layer video layer method often will bring it in miss-sized if the source video isn't the same size as your document, it will not resize it to fit. And then when you try to resize it it won't let you do it without converting it to a smart object first. That's not necessarily bad, but it's much cleaner and easier if you can just directly import the videos at the size that they were created. But you may be wondering, well, we imported it and we see the thumbnail over here in the layers panel, but we don't see it on the screen, or even in the timeline. Well, we do see a hint of it over here on the right. And if we scroll over, that's where that second video is brought in. Photoshop imported it after the first video, that's why they're together in this video group. A couple other quick ways of being able to add videos. You could click the little video icon here and say add media or new video group. That way will work as well. Or you can click the plus icon over here on the right which also brings up the open dialog box to add more videos. So, let's talk about the timeline panel that we see here. So, how we can scroll left and right in order to see those videos on the timeline. If it gets too long and too far, this is the scale slider. This does not actually change the videos. It just changes your view of them. So, you can sort of zoom in and out on the timeline by using this slider down here. Over on the left we have the frame rate. This is 29.97 which is pretty typical for video. The current timestamp, which if you mouse over it, you can see turns into a double arrow icon, which you can hold down and scrub left and right, and that's the same as scrubbing through the video. In other words, scrub is something that's used in video editing a lot, which essentially means move your viewpoint within the video, not by playback, by just grabbing your viewpoint and moving it. We can do that here as well. This little blue handle up here above the timeline is the current position and you can grab that and move it along to scrub through the video manually. These little gray book ends represent the the work area of the video. If you have a very long video or even if they're just seconds of the video on the outside of if that's in the beginning or at the end that you don't really want and that a typical way of shooting video cause it easier to cut it out than it is to create new seconds of video if you need it. These represent the work areas, which then can be clipped or moved in to trim the video area. And when you do that, the first one essentially becomes the first frame of the video, and the last one becomes the last frame. Even though these frames outside here still exist, they're not going to be rendered within the final video. Now I'm going to increase the timeline panel just a little bit here so we can see a little more within this to talk about some of the additional features that we have available to us. As we spoke about before, this is a video group, which means that these are videos in a group that are going to be placed end to end within the timeline. They're not stacked on top of each other because if they were, whichever one was on top would be the only one visible. But instead, they are end to end. And let's rename this group to morning routine. Note that the layer that appears first in the group or at the bottom is what comes first in the time line. So, if we rearrange them, you can see they switch places on the timeline. Likewise, if we arrange them on the timeline by grabbing those videos and moving them over, they switch places in the video group over here in the layers panel. And, if we open up or expand this morning routine group, we can see some editable, or I should say animatable properties within this morning routine group. Which consists of position, opacity, and style. And we´ll get a little bit more into how we animate these in a future lesson, but that´s how you access them. We did discuss before how to adjust the work area of the entire video project, but we can also adjust sort of the work area of the individual video by trimming it. And that is if you hover your mouse directly over the very edge of the video here, you see the changes to that different cursor, that's the trim tool. And as we pull that in it shows where we're trimming this to. This is an easy way to cut off any extra footage at the front or the back of the video. So we'll trim a little bit from both sides and notice how the video automatically moved over to the left to still meet this first video. So we didn't have to manually move it ourselves, Photoshop did that for us. So at this point, this video has extra space in the front and in the back of it. Those frames are not deleted, they're simply not visible. And they will not be rendered within the final video project. But we can do what's called slip edit, which means we can sort of slide the visible area of this video back and forth within that trimmed area and that's by holding down the Ctrl and the Alt key and clicking within here and moving it left or right. Now on a Macintosh, that's gonna be Option and Ctrl to move in here as well. There's not a lot of visual feedback other than the thumbnail that updates. So you will need to go back in here and visually verify which portions of it you want to have visible. The icons up here at the top of the timeline are fairly familiar. There's the go to the first frame icon, go to previous frame, play, go to next frame, mute audio playback. The playback options just help to speed up the playback on your machine if your machine seems to be lagging down a little bit. Change the resolution to maybe 25%. It'll make it easier to play it back. The split at play head is what you would do if you actually want to cut one of the videos. So if we have our play head here at the one minute mark, then we hit the split, it now changes what was one video into two. Also I noticed we have two video layers within our video group. In this last icon, indicate the transitions that you can automatically place within Photoshop. So let's add a fade to the beginning. It's outside our work area so we'll have to go in and take a look at that. But we can adjust the work area to go back here to it. Now it's hard to see because my zoom is so far out. So I'm gonna zoom in more and go in and see it. This little triangle here indicates the fade transition. And I can adjust the Duration of it by clicking on it and dragging left and right and so it fades from transparency all the way in. We'll deal more with transitions in a later lesson. If you right click on the video object you get a couple other options as far as the duration of that video clip and the speed. So if you wanna play something back really fast or really slow you can adjust the speed of it here. Also, if you're working with video a lot, I do recommend opening up this timeline menu over here on the right. Going to Allow Frame Skipping, this will help a lot with your playback being a little bit smoother, and I also like to enable Timeline Shortcut Keys. So with that enabled, now if I tap on the Space bar, it starts playing. Tap on the Space bar again to make it stop playing, or pause the playback. And the left and right arrow keys advance by frames. So tapping on the right arrow key goes forward one frame at a time, and the left arrow key goes back one frame at a time. I find those to be incredibly helpful when I'm trying to get very exact cuts within my video projects. So that brings lesson 2.1 to a close on exploring the interface, and your import options. Lesson 2.2 is next where we take a look at the difference between the video layers in video groups.