An overview of the Timeline panel

If you're going to work with video inside of Adobe Photoshop, you're going to need take control of the Timeline panel. Let's go ahead and open up an existing project to explore some of the basic features. I'll choose File > Open, and I'm just going to navigate to a lesson file. Now a Photoshop timeline is just a standard Photoshop document, and because the video files are linked to, rather than embedded, it's a relatively tiny file. The Timeline panel opens and this used to be called an Animation panel in earlier versions of Photoshop.

So if you don't see the panel, just go under the Window menu and call up Timeline, and that will bring it up. Another way of accessing that is to choose the Motion workspace and then simply reset it, so all the default panels come into play. If you want to move through the timeline, you'll just drag the playhead. Now earlier versions call this the current-time indicator, but it is now referred to as the playhead. So if you're reading an old tutorial or you see some information about the CTI or current time indicator, just call it the playhead. This works great and you've got the ability to also limit the workarea. By dragging these bars here, you could set what area will playback and if you're only working on a small portion, this can make it easier to isolate.

(video playing) So using the work area bar lets you define what plays back when you press Play, and makes it easier to isolate a smaller portion of a much larger sequence. If you're not getting smooth playback, you're going to have three options. The first option is add more RAM. RAM is going to be a key factor to performance, closely followed by the video card in your system. Of course, running out and buying new hardware may not be an option right now, so let me show you two other things you can do. In the timeline, you can go ahead and turn off the audio playback, and this will reduce the burden on the system. So now as you press Play, it's going to do a better job.

One other option is the ability to turn on or off Frame Skipping. If you turn this off, what's going to happen is it will play at a reduced speed initially. You'll notice down here in red, it's showing you the current frame rate, and it's not matching the 23976 in all cases. However, what's happening is the frames are being loaded into RAM and they are getting stored. So once the frames have successfully loaded, when you play it back the next time, it will play smoothly. Let's go ahead and pause and drag on back here and press the Play button, and you see we now have real time playback that's quite smooth. I could also now turn the audio back on and we'll get smoother performance.

(video playing) That works great! If you're impatient and you don't want to wait for the frames to cache, simply choosing the option to Allow Frame Skipping will maintain audio sync while dropping frames and it may look a little bit jittery, but it will play back a little bit better.