Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Opening and Importing Video Clips

Another way to create a new video project is by opening an existing clip. You won’t get the handy guides that you do when you create a blank video project as described in the previous section, but you can always add ’em yourself (Guides, Grids, and Rulers).

Note

Photoshop understands MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MOV, AVI, and FLV files (if Adobe Flash is installed on your computer), as well as the Image Sequence formats (where each frame of the video is saved as an individual file) BMP, DICOM, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, PSD, TARGA, TIFF, Cineon, and JPEG 2000. Whew!

To open a video clip as a new document, choose File→Open, navigate to where the clip lives on your hard drive, and then click Open. Photoshop creates a new document whose size matches the size of the frames in the video, opens the Timeline panel, if it’s not already open (Figure 21-2, top), and plops the clip into a video track. Photoshop also creates a group in the Layers panel (named Video Group 1) and places the clip in that group on its own Video layer (Figure 21-2, bottom).

Clips in a single video track play one after another. To add more clips to your track, click the tiny filmstrip icon next to the track’s name in the Timeline panel, and then choose Add Media; alternatively, click the + sign to the right of the video track (on the right side of the panel). In the resulting dialog box, navigate to where the clip(s) live (Shift- or ⌘-click [Ctrl-click] to choose more than one file), and then click ...