Loading video clips into Photoshop

In this movie I'll show you what I consider to be the easiest way to bring video clips into Photoshop. And I'll also show you how to sequence your clips and adjust their duration. For starters, make you don't have anything open inside Photoshop. Then bring up the Timeline panel, either by going to the Window Menu and choosing the Timeline command, or you can just click on the Timeline tab in the bottom left corner of the screen. Now notice that, unlike in a previous chapter, because we don't have anything open, Photoshop doesn't ask us if we want to create an animation or a video.

It just assumes that you want to start adding video clips.in which case click on the Plus sign, on the far right side of the panel, to bring up the Add Clip style log box. If you're working along with me navigate your way to the Media File sub folder inside the 39 video folder. And if you're working on a PC, make sure files of type is set to all formats, which you'll find at the bottom of the pop-up menu. In which case you'll see a series of movies, all from the Fotolia image library, by the way, about which you can learn more at fotolia.com/deke Right now I want to add the first four movies, we'll come back to the Win movie, later in this chapter, and you do that by clicking on Fotolia error, dot MOV, and then Shift clicking on Fotolia water, and that will select that range of files.

And then click on the open button to add all four video clips to the timeline. Notice that those clips also appear here inside the Layers panel, because there's always a direct relationship between the Timeline panel and the Layers panel. And these objects are identified as movie clips by these little film strip icons in the bottom right corner of the thumbnails. All the clips are automatically added to a single video group. And you can change its name not by double clicking on it here inside the timeline panel. But rather by double clicking on it here inside the layers panel. And I'll just go ahead and call these guys movies, because this is the only video group we're going to be creating.

Also notice that the order of the movies from Fotolia air first to Fotolia water last. Is in the same order, albeit starting at the bottom and going up, as the movies appear inside the Layers panel. I want to make a movie about the four traditional elements: earth, air, fire, and water, which means that I need earth to appear first, not second. And the easiest way to make that happen is to just drag the earth layer below the air layer here inside the Layers panel. However, if you do that, if you drag the object outside of the group, then you're going to run into problems, because what's going to happen here, is Photoshop is going to automatically make a new track here inside the timeline panel, which I don't want.

So I'm going to press Ctrl Z or Cmd Z on the Mac to undo that mistake, and I'll try out the safer approach, which is to drag air above earth. Like so. Now notice that the earth clip appears first, then the air clip, followed by fire and water, which is exactly what I want. All right, now to make some adjustments to our clips. All of these clips are designed to be curtailed to whatever duration that we like, whatever length, in other words. And they're all silent movies as well. However I do want to show you a trick here. If you don't like the audio that's associated with your movie. Just go ahead and click on this little right pointy arrowhead in the top right corner of the clip.

And switch to the audio tab and then you can turn on mute audio. Or you can create phase as you can see here as well as adjust the volume. Anyway I'm going to press the escape key because that's not what I want to do. What I want to do is change the length of my clip, and I'm probably going to find that easier to pull off if I go ahead and zoom in. So I'll go ahead and click on this little mountain icon right there, in order to zoom in on the timeline. And I want this first clip to last for nine seconds. One way to do that is to move your cursor over the end point here. And make sure that it looks like a couple of arrows set inside of a right bracket, as opposed to one set inside of a left bracket, because we want to change the right side of this clip.

That is, we want to drag it inward. And you can do so by dragging like so. And as you drag, you'll see, not only the end point listed in the upper left hand corner of that preview, but also a duration. And we want the duration to be a total of nine seconds. So as soon as you see 09:00, just go ahead and release. And notice that not only changes the length of this movie, but also goes ahead and tucks in the next movie so that there's no seam between them. Alright, now let's go ahead and scroll over a little bit.

The air movie is way too long. I just want it to be 5 seconds. And another way to pull that off is to click on this Right Pointing Arrowhead once again, and then change the Duration Value. And all you have to do is dial in 5, you don't have to enter the s, and then press the Tab key, and notice that the change immediately takes place. Yet another way to work, if I want Fotolia_fire to be five seconds long, then I could go ahead and click up here where it tells me the time codes, click to move this blue Playhead to that location. Now I want to drag the play head over from 1 seconds over to 19 seconds, and I can just keep an eye on this value down here in the lower left corner of the screen and as soon as I hit 19 colon 00 and I know I have found the right point, and I can now go ahead and scroll over to the right a little bit, grab that right edge and then snap it into alignment... So things are always snapping into the play head inside the timeline panel and finally an even easier solution if you don't want to scroll all the way over and try to figure out where this ray pointing row head is, just make sure that you can see any portion of the clip and right click inside of it and you get that same panel.

And in this case, I'm going to change the water clip to five seconds as well, and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac, in order to implement that change. And now, if you drag the playhead around, you can see that one clip goes ahead and automatically transitions into another, albeit is a hard cut point. So that's how you load video clips in the Photoshop, as well as sequence them and adjust their duration. In the next movie, I'll show you how to create gradual transitions between one video clip and another.