Will Head
However, these effects tend to be applied across the whole frame, so if you just need to tweak a certain element, you may find that you’re battling against the program to achieve the results you want.
If you’re accustomed to using Photoshop to tidy up images, you may wish that the tools available were accessible to your editing app. Luckily, there’s an easy way to bring the power of Photoshop to your video, as Photoshop supports video files as well.
Now, you wouldn’t want to use Photoshop as your editing application – that isn’t one of its strengths. You’ll still want to put your clips into a dedicated suite such as Final Cut or Premiere Pro once you’ve finished tweaking. Also bear in mind that anything but simple stuff is going to be labour intensive, as Photoshop essentially treats each video file as a stack of images, so any changes that you make have to be applied to each one and, with 25 a second, this soon adds up.
The good thing about Photoshop, though, is it provides the power you’re used to having to modify and clean up still images, and you can now use it on video. You’ll need the Photoshop Extended version not the regular edition, but if you’ve bought any of the CS5 bundles except for Design Standard, then Photoshop Extended is included.
In terms of file formats, you can open Mpeg-1, Mpeg-4, Mov and AVI files natively, FLV if you have Flash installed, and Mpeg-2 if there’s a suitable decoder on your Mac.
Once you’ve opened your video file, the first thing you’ll notice is that it looks very much like an image and not a video – you can only see the first frame and the only clue that it’s anything different is the little film icon on the Layers palette.
In order to scrub through your video to find the frame you want, you have to open the Animation palette from the Window menu. You’ll now see a familiar timeline with playhead that you can use to navigate through the individual frames of your movie.
If your video is interlaced then it may appear jagged when imported into Photoshop, since interlaced video only updates either the odd or even lines in each frame. As a result, Photoshop will show you odd and even lines that are effectively one frame apart. To solve this, go to the Layer menu, select Video Layers, then Interpret Footage, and tick the box next to De-Interlace. You can also alter the video’s frame rate here.
Photoshop lets you apply some effects to every frame in your video, so if you add an adjustment layer for Levels, for example, you can colour correct the whole video file in one go without having to apply the effect to every single frame. Using an adjustment layer also brings the normal non-destructive advantages so you can later tweak or remove the layer if you want to change the effect.
Since a video file is essentially a collection of images, you have all of Photoshop’s editing tools at your disposal. While this provides you with endless scope for transforming your video, bear in mind that as video runs at 25fps, then just processing a single minute of footage will involve adjusting 1500 frames. It’s by no means a quick-fix option.
If you intend on doing some intricate work frame by frame, then it’s worth leaving Photoshop until the end of the process when you’re fairly set on which shots you’re going to use. There’s no point tweaking five minutes of footage if you only end up using five seconds in the final edit.
The trade-off for this manual labour, however, is the quality of the results you can achieve. For example, you can use Photoshop’s Spot Healing Brush tool to remove items from a frame, such as the JVC logo on the speakers in the bottom-left screen (opposite). Ideally, it would be better to remove the logo before you start filming, but if you need a shot of generic speakers and you overlooked this, it’s still quicker to fix this in Photoshop rather than re-shoot from scratch, especially if it’s only a few seconds of footage you need to clean up.
Just as you can use non-destructive adjustment layers, Photoshop also includes blank video layers that hold frame-by-frame edits. To make a new one, go to the Layer menu, select Video Layers and then New Blank Video Layer. By making any edits on the new blank layer, you have the option to turn them on or off later, which gives more flexibility.
When you’re editing a video frame by frame, any additional shortcuts that can help speed up the process can have a significant impact on the time involved. By default, to navigate between frames you either have to move the playhead by hand or click the frame advance and rewind buttons at the bottom right of the Animation palette. However, if you open the Animation palette menu from the top-right hand corner and select Enable Timeline Shortcut Keys, you can then use the arrow keys to navigate forwards and back one frame at time, which is a huge time-saver.
Once you’ve finished tweaking your video file, you’ll need to export it. Hit the Save menu and the file will be saved in Photoshop PSD format by default. However, look at it in the Finder and you’ll see it’s considerably smaller than the original video file you were editing. This is because the PSD references the original video file and only stores the changes you’ve made. You can import the PSD into Premiere Pro and it will playback as if it were a video file, although there’s obviously a performance impact, as the video needs to be rendered each time.
You can also export your changes as a regular video file instead. Go to the File menu, select Export then Render Video, and choose your settings. You can output it as a QuickTime file or, alternatively, as an image sequence that you can then stitch it back together in an editing application – although some will treat an image sequence as a native video clip.
Photoshop isn’t an everyday video editing tool and, due to the timescales involved, you’ll generally want to limit its use to special cases. However, if you need to fix something that you overlooked when filming, having the full power of Photoshop at your fingertips could save you having to reshoot – even if that does involve painstaking frame-by-frame work.