Create a simple video composite - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's begin our video compositing journey by creating a very simple composite from a still image and a video clip. In this short project, we're gonna add a gently surreal element to a vintage photo to create an interesting cinemagraph effect. So, this is a photograph from about 1915 from the US Library of Congress, and, when I saw this, I knew that the light area in the foreground would make it very easy to drop a video clip, or even a still image, in there, through the use of blending modes and a simple layer mask. Before we get to that, however, let's do some housekeeping, here. I'm gonna go up to the Window menu and choose Workspace, Motion. And, the main thing that the motion workspace gives us is the video Timeline panel, here, which we're gonna be using a lot of. And, I'm just gonna arrange this so that I can see all of my Tool panel, there. And, let's nudge that up, there. Next, what I wanna do is click this button in the Timeline panel that says Create Video Timeline, 'cause, right now, this is still being treated as a still image, and we need to turn it into a video timeline. And, there, we have that, there. If I use the sliders, here, at the bottom of the Timeline panel, I can expand that. And, you can see that this photograph is represented on the timeline track as lasting about five seconds. I'm actually gonna stretch that out a bit, by grabbing the right side of that to stretch that out. And, let's just kinda bring this up here to about, I don't know, eight or nine seconds, for now, that's good. Let me double-click on this layer, and I'll just rename it Ironing. And now, let's bring in the video clip that we're gonna work with. There are couple ways I could bring in a new video clip. I could click on this plus symbol, just to the right of that video track in the Timeline panel. Or, I could come and click on this little filmstrip icon, just to the left of that video track, and I'll do that right now, and choose Add Media. I'm gonna come out to the Exercise Files, into the Ch 1 folder, and then into the Video Assets folder, and I'm gonna get the file called 01_gentle_waves. So, we can see, in the Layers panel, that gentle waves has been added, here, as a video layer, and a new Video Group has been created. So, whenever you add media, using this little menu, here, or clicking on the plus symbol, on this side, it is gonna create a new Video Group, which means it is going to arrange the clips, or the layers, sequentially. So, this layer is now playing, here, and now, it would switch to this layer, right here. For compositing purposes, I need to have these out of the group, so I can place them on top of each other. So, to do that, I'm gonna click up on the Video Group, at the top of the Layers panel, I'm gonna right-click on it, and I'm gonna choose Ungroup Layers. And now, you can see that the gentle waves is on its own separate track, and I'm gonna move this to where it aligns with the beginning of the clip. And, I'm going to stretch out the length of the vintage photo to make it match the gentle waves clip. Alright, so, the video of the waves seems much too small, but, in reality, it's the photograph that is too large. The video of the waves is 1920 by 1080, and that, really, is as big as I would probably export this video project. So, I need to resize down the photograph, rather than scaling up the video clip. So, first, I'm gonna click on the video, and I'm gonna lower the opacity in the Layers panel down to about 50%, roughly, 'cause I wanna see that rock, there, in relationship to the rest of the picture of the woman ironing. I'm gonna click on the Ironing photo, I'm gonna go up to the Edit menu, and I'm gonna choose Free Transform. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and grab a corner handle, and then, I'm also gonna add the Option or the Alt key, on Windows, into that. So, I have the Shift key down, which is constraining the aspect ratio, I'm gonna add Option in, and it's gonna drag from the center, and that would be Alt on Windows. So, my aim, here, is to get this to where the iron is roughly about the same size as the rock. That looks pretty good, right there, something like that. Let me zoom up a little bit, using Command + Plus, or Control + Plus on Windows, and see how that looks. Yeah, that looks pretty good. And, the reason I'm concerned about aligning the rock with the iron is that the waves are breaking around the rock, and if I position this right, it's gonna look as if the waves are breaking around the iron. So, that looks pretty good, right there. I'm gonna press the Enter key to apply that. And now, I'm just gonna crop this down. In the Crop Options bar, I'm gonna make sure that Delete Cropped Pixels is not checked, 'cause I am gonna be cropping off a little bit of the picture, and, if I decide later I don't want to, I can always get it back. And, I'm just gonna come in to the edge of the video, and then, we'll align it with the top of the photograph, and then, also, the bottom of the photograph, here. I'll press the Enter or the Return key to crop that, and that looks pretty good. And, if I scrub through this, we can see how the waves are coming in and breaking, there, around the iron, because that rock is there. So, that is actually working out really well. Let's set the opacity of that gentle waves layer back to 100%. So, with the image scaled to fit the video, we're now ready to move on to creating a mask to complete the blending effect.