26.1. Video and Animation in Photoshop

One of the first things you should be clear about in terms of working with video in Photoshop is the distinction between what you can and can't do. For instance, you can't re-cut existing footage, and you probably shouldn't expect to be able to edit the next Citizen Kane armed only with a handheld camcorder and Photoshop. However, you can import clips of video, reposition them in relation to each other, transition between one clip and the next, overlay existing photos, add text captions or titles, and so on.

26.1.1. Video formats

Photoshop offers support for the following standard video formats:

  • MOV. This is the native format for Apple's QuickTime software. The QuickTime format can act as a wrapper for other media, including video and audio tracks encoded using various different codecs. QuickTime is compatible with both Mac OS and Windows systems.

  • AVI. Audio Video Interleave, or AVI as it's commonly known, is Microsoft's default video format for Windows systems.

  • MPEG/MPG. This is the video format developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group. Different flavors of the MPEG format are used for varying purposes, and by default you can import MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 into Photoshop. If you have installed an MPEG encode on your system, you can also import MPEG-2, which is the standard for broadcast-quality video.

  • FLV. FLV stands for Flash Video, and it's the default format that much of the video on the Internet today is encoded in, due to the ubiquity ...

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