How to edit video in Adobe Photoshop

Hi there, in this video we are going to look at Video Editing. We're going to add music, logos are going to fly in. I'm going to talk all the way through. There's going to be transitions, where we flick from one shot to another. We add background music. There's a lower third, you can see there, hey, that's my name. All of this can be done in Adobe Photoshop. It's pretty crazy, it's pretty amazing, let's jump in now and learn how to do it. 

To get started, the easiest way is to go to 'File', 'Open', and in your '13 Videos', click on 'Talking Head'. And Photoshop has the ability to open mp4s, MOVs, AVIs, maybe. mp4 is the kind of most generic format though, let's click 'Open'. The cool thing about it is it will default to something that looks like this. You'll have this magic time line up here. Your layers over here are different, you can see, it's a video group. You can see that icon has a little film reel in the corner. The main one we need is this little time line, if it doesn't appear, go to 'Window', 'Workspace', and just say, I want it to be set to 'Motion', please. This should bring it up. 

There's one other way to get started, and I'll show you just quickly. You can go to 'File', 'New', and go to this option that says 'Film & Video', and this option here at the beginning is generally the most common format. It's called 1080p, just means it's 1080 pixels high. It's just the generic size for high definition video. The only difference between doing it this way, I'll just show you real quick, it's not the way I want you to do. I just want you to know you can do it this way. Is once you've got it here, you need to go to 'File', 'Import Linked'. You can embed them, but linking the video files just means the file size of this PSD is not going to be huge. So we place it in, hit 'Return' to get it the right size. We just need to click on this button here, 'Create Time line'. And basically we're ready to go again. 

So it's up to you, we're going to close that down, don't save it. We're going to use the 'File', 'Open' method. It's better, and quicker. First thing is, you're going to learn one shortcut, the space bar. If you hit 'Space bar', it will start playing, and 'Space bar' again is Stop. So use that one reasonably a lot. Or you can just hit this 'Play' and 'Stop' button. The other thing to know is, you need to keep an eye on this thing here. At the moment it says 25 frames/second. Basically it's the Frame Rate or the speed at which this video plays. Now Photoshop is not built for video editing. It can do it, then it does a pretty good job, but for me, for all my editing I'll use a purpose built program. For Adobe, it's Adobe Premiere Pro. Some other people use Final Cuts, which is Apple products, but Premiere Pro is kind of purpose built. Means it plays back really nice and fast, has a lot more settings and features. 

The reason I show you here in Photoshop how to edit video is, it means we get to rely on a lot of the tools we already know. So if you want to correct the levels of this, we can just click on this 'Levels Layer'. Go to 'Adjustments, and go to 'Levels', it's cool. Hue & Saturation works, all these tricks, we can go up to Filter, use Blur and Blur Gallery. All the stuff you know and love. The big drawback is that there's not too many features for editing video. It's kind of caveman style, and the other one is the playback. Gets real jumpy, real stressed out if you-- we're just going to do a really short, kind of a few second video, but as soon as we get into anything longer than that, poor old Photoshop tries his best, but it's not purpose built. If you're interested in a Premiere Pro course, check out my course in Premiere Pro. But let's stick to Photoshop, because it is pretty amazing, other than it's slow, and it's missing a few features that I like, man, you can get quite far just editing video in Photoshop. 

One of the things to help you though, is click on this 'cog', and switch down the resolution to '25%'. Just means, watch this, if I hit 'Play', it gets quite pixelated. It just means that it's previewing it pixelated. It will actually export a high resolution. Doesn't matter what you've got the resolution set here, but while you're working, set it to 25. Next thing to do is your editing. In this case, I'm going to scrub along. Basically I have two false starts, and then I get into it. So watch this, I'll show what I mean. Where do I finish up? Here we go. So let's play this. Happens a lot, right? Takes about 10 takes to do any good take. So what we have to do is edit it up. So there's that one, then there's that one I'm talking. I lose it again.  This last one here at-- you can see down here, I'm at 26 seconds, that's a good indication for you as well. 

So I'm just going to scrub back - call it scrubbing. - to just before I wave my hand, that's where I'm going to cut it. To cut it, you can click on this fella here, and click on the little scissors, and it just chops it in bits. You click on this first chunk, right in the middle of the blue bit. Hit 'Delete', and it gets rid of that first chunk. That's one way of doing it. So I can hit 'Space bar' to see where it starts. Now works fine. I'm going to scrub to the end, where I finish, that's it. So about there. There I stop. So instead of using the scissors and deleting it, you can actually just drag the ends, and say, actually, there you go. So either use the scissors, or just drag the ends, it's up to you. 

So that's our first bit of editing. How do we bring in another video file? Easiest way is 'File', let's bring in 'Place Linked'. We're bringing in 'Talking Head 2', 'Place Linked'. And this one here. At the moment it's asking me, do I want to resize it? I don't, just going to hit 'Return' on my keyboard, and now I'm going to scrub along. This one here, I only have one good take. So you don't have to mess about too much for this one. So you'll see somewhere there, that's me talking. I wish you could see the waveform. If you're like using Premiere Pro, you're like, "Wish I could just see the audio track," you can't. Also so you know, if you do really enjoy Photoshop video editing, just doing short social media, Instagram hacks, perfect for it, you can actually buy plug-ins for Photoshop to take video editing to another level. I haven't bought them or use them myself, because I jump into something like Premiere, but if you are a person, you're like, "Man, don't need to learn Premiere, just give me some few extra features in Photoshop, and I'll be good.” 

There are plug-ins you can buy to kind of take it to the next level So there's me talking, me talking, me talking, and then I stopped. It's going to be enough for this edit. We're not worried too much about the dialogue. We're just getting the techniques here. So I'm going to scrub this little scrubber here to find the end, or you can use-- see this here, there's like a little baby hill, big hill. So big hill zooms in, small hill zooms out. I'm going to keep zooming out until I can see the end. I could use my scissors or just drag it till it snaps. That my friends is my editing from this, this is called Jump Cut. So I'm going to hit 'Space bar'. See that? Jump Cut. It's not even a cut at all, or jump transition, just one stops, one starts. And they can work, in my case it looks a bit weird. There's a bit of a jump. Camera moves as well. 

So the first little technique we're going to look at is Transitions. So Transitions are hidden in this little icon here, I click on them, and here are our basics. Let's have a look at fade. Click, hold, and drag it, and you can see, I can kind of straddle both of these here. Let's have a little look. This is going to fade out, and fade back in. For that to really work you need maybe a black background here. So you can make a new layer, put it at the back, fill it with black; 'Edit', 'Fill'. We'll use a shortcut, and just make sure that you've got a layer underneath. Filling this, it might be white that you want to transition to. So all I've done is create a new layer, put it at the bottom, and stretched it, so it's underneath here, so now in this phase, I don't know why the transitions are really slow. I'm going to get rid of this layer here. Let's switch this one, let's delete this one. Just click on it physically in the time line, and delete it with your 'Delete' key, let's try 'Cross Fade'. 

And this one's going to-- does something kind of weird here, it's okay. Don't worry about it, but watch this, it's going to try and save him across, maybe one to the other. It's not going to work in this case. So I'm undoing. What I want is, it's up to you. It's really common to have Fade to Black or Fade to White. I like Fade to White. Just as a personal preference, or Dip to White, normally it's called. And I like it quite short, can you see, I can zoom in. Bigger. Big mountain, big mountain, and just grab the ends of these, and just tighten them in. I find a nice kind of white flash, keeps pace, and it's-- you'll see all of my intros do that. A whole lot faster than that. So really just kind of like a little white flash. That's what I like. Most people will use a Fade to Black though rather than a Fade to White. 

Another little basic editing trick, is when you're doing one of these cuts, it's kind of weird that I appear at the same place. What you can do is fake another camera, or a different shot. So what I want to do is, with this layer here, Talking Head 2, I'm going to transform it. I'm using my 'Command T', you can go to 'Edit', 'Transform'. And I'm just going to scale it up so it looks like, I was really kind of framed in here. 'Enter'. It's a cool little trick. It feels like it's a whole different place and the camera's been reset up rather than just taking out my terrible-- That's up to you So we'll end at transition, we did a little flash to white. It's playing a bit slowly here, so I'm not going to worry too much about the timing until I render it. And I scaled this one up to look like there's a bit of a camera change. Only problem is going to be a little bit of pixelization, so it's up to you. I'm happy with it. I find it reads better as I clip, rather than me just kind of flashing, and appearing in the exact same place. If I had to flash again I'd appear back at that sort of scale, and just toggle between the two. 

Next thing we're going to do is add some audio, so down here where it says Audio Track, click on this, 'Add Audio', and in your '13 Video' file, I've got 'Background Music' ready to go. Let's have a little look, zoom out. You can see, it's a really long clip, so I'm just going to tuck it into the end here. Zoom back in. Back to the beginning, hit ' Space bar'. So the background music there, really good for things like intros. The only trouble here is that it's really loud. So I'm going to right click it anywhere in that green part, and just lower it down to something so that you can still hear me. Let's go. 

Music really adds a special feature. Where do you get music from? There is a few places, the one I know off the top of my head is Wistia. That's W-I-S-T-I-A; Wistia. They have some free stock music you can use, but for me I get all of mine from Shutterstock. One of the few places that still do audio. And this might have cost me, I'm guessing, about 30 US dollars. And I use it over and over again as my backing music. So that's how to add music. Let's do another typical video editing thing in Photoshop, and it's the logo intro. 

So what we're going to do is go 'File', we're going to go to 'Place Linked'. We're going to bring in the bringyourownlaptop logo. It's my business, it's in '13 Video', let's click 'Place'. Let's click 'OK'. And it's the right size already, hit 'Return' to kind of set it in there. Now we're going to have a little bit of an issue where, this just kind of lumped wherever my play head was. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to have nothing selected, just have this selected, drag it to the beginning. How long do I want it to be? Not sure yet. I'm going to grab all of this, holding 'Shift' to click both of these, just drag it over here, until I get the timing of this right. 

So how long does it need to be? The way I do it is I hit 'Space bar', then I hit 'Space bar' again when I feel it's been too long, so 'Space bar', maybe a bit longer, about there, feels right. Grab the end, tuck it in, spacing again. That feels maybe a little bit longer. Here we go. So now I'm going to grab these two fellas, drag them in. Extend the background music so it starts there. I'm going to have it so it carries to the end there. We're going to do a bit of logo animation. So I'm going to get it to move in. So what I'd like to do is, right back at the beginning just drag it to the left. Let's click 'OK', make sure this layer is selected. I've got my 'Move Tool'. I'm going to start it off screen. So you can't see it. 

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to twirl down this little option. This gives me keyframes. Basically what I want to do is-- we're going to use Position in this case, I'm going to set what's called a keyframe, a little stopwatch, you say, I want, at this time, where my play head is I want you to be there. And in this case it's off screen. Then a little bit later I would like you-- I'm just going to use my Move Tool here and drag it on. Drag it to the center there. Let go. Can you see, it made an extra little keyframe. At frame one it's over here on the left, and at frame, whatever I decide it was. So I dragged my head and just moved it in, it creates a keyframe for you. 

Back at the beginning, hit 'Space bar'; too fast. If it is too fast, there's just not enough time, or not enough space between these two, so just grab the second one. Expand it a little bit. "Hi there, I'm happy with it but it probably needs to hang around a little longer. Zoom out. Grab these two fellas, hold 'Shift', click them both. Nice. Now for this, it probably needs a white backing. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to have my foreground color as white, then hold down 'Option-Back space', or 'Alt-Back space' on a PC. We're going to just talk about the layers real briefly. Don't worry too much about them. 

What ends up happening is, because these guys are in a row, they're in a video group. So what I'm going to do is just kind of drag it up. What ends up happening, can you see, it comes out of that group. Anything that's on the same line is in a group. I'm going to twirl this up here, because I want you, my friend, to be underneath it. And it's kind of hard to do in the Layers Panel here. It's actually easy just to do it here. So not in the same group, I want you to be just out. What ends up happening here in the time line is they end up being on top of each other. Exciting logo slides in, Dan starts talking. I might add a transition at the beginning there. I'm going to-- am I going to fade in? Yes, let's fade in. Not that long. Come at the end, don't drag it. Maybe not even a Fade, it's going to be a white. So where we are. Fade with white. Same thing, so it's not going to have a transparent background. There we go. 

Let's do one of the last typical uses of video in Photoshop. We're going to do what's called the lower thirds. You saw at the beginning there, it's just my name that appears. You know, Hi, I am Daniel Scott, and I am a Certified Instructor. This is where we get to use our lovely Photoshop skills. So I'm going to grab my 'Rectangle Tool', and I'm going to draw a Fill, it's going to be white. I was going to draw a rectangle over here. And what I'd like to do is just drag it so it's above everything, so out of any groups. I'll twirl these up to make it look nice. We're not worried too much about where it sits in the time line here. I'm going to build this, so I've got this kind of boxed to hold my text. I'll grab my 'Type Tool', I'm not going to click in the box. I don't like it because it turns the box into a text box, and I don't want that. So I'm going to undo. And I'm just going to draw my text out here. 

This is going to say, 'Daniel Scott'. I'm going to pick black. I'm going to pick a file size that fits on screen. I'm duplicating that layer. I'm going to type in, "I'm an Adobe certified awesome person." No, Certified Instructor. I'm just messing about with font. Font size. Zoom in a little bit so you can see what I'm doing. This is my lower third, right? So we have to kind of build this in Photoshop. In Premiere Pro if you go to 'Window', and go to 'Graphic Essentials', these kind of pre-built, plus pre animated. But again, because we have skills in Photoshop it's actually not that hard. So we got these three people. I'd like to make sure they're all aligned on top of each other, where I want them to come in, zoom out on our time line down here. 

I'm going to have to make it quite tall now, because I've got so many layers going on. So it's going to play for a bit, then I want this a little bit later on. So I selected all three of them. Click the first one, hold 'Shift', and click the other two. And I'm just going to adjust the timing. It's timed okay. So what I'd like to do is get them to all kind of fade in. We've looked at Position, which we did with the logo. We'll do it now with a Fade in. So we could do it individually to all three of them, or with all the layers selected over here, or over here, hit 'Group', which is 'Command G', or 'Ctrl G' on a PC. And it just means we can do it to the whole group of them, rather than trying to do them all individually. And in here I'm going to set the Opacity at the beginning. And it's hard to get right to the beginning, right? 

There's a little trick you can do in Photoshop, is hold down the 'Shift' key. So if I hold the 'Shift' key while dragging this little play head, you can see, snaps to all important parts. So a really handy trick. 'Space bar', 'Play', hold 'Shift' while you're dragging to snap to points. So Opacity is going to be there. And I'd like the Opacity to be, over here in your Layers Panel, turn it to '0'. You can see a little keyframe. So if, beginning here the Opacity is at 0 and then after some time, I'm going to grab the Opacity and send it up to 100%. You can see, it put it in that second keyframe. Thank you, Photoshop. Let's give it a test for the timing. 

Yes, I'm happy with it. Again, if you want to adjust this timer, hold down 'Shift' while you're dragging the play head, because this keyframe, you can see, it snaps to the keyframe now. You can say, actually I just want it to kind of be there. So you can kind of still see through it. Looks kind of cool. And what I'll do is, I'm going to get it to fade out at the end, because at the moment it just kind of slumps. 

Now why don't I just use the Fade out? Because it doesn't work in groups, I could ungroup these, and just drag it onto each of them, that would work, but I wanted to show you how we practice with keyframes. So what I want to do is-- most people get to the end, and they'll just turn this off. So they'll go to here. The other problem is, if you're at the last keyframe, you can't see Opacity, you need to kind of come back. Just one little touch. Make sure that's selected. Now you can turn the Opacity, go down the Opacity at 0. So the problem with it is that it goes from 0 to 100, and then starts working its way back down to 0. So it's not really hanging around at any stage. So I'm going to undo what we did, 'Step Backwards'. 

So what we need to do is, after some time we put in another kind of forced keyframe. That one there that says, I'm going to make a keyframe. And it's going to be the exact same as this one, just basically picks it up, copies it, and puts it there. That means it's going to be a stretch in here where it's exactly the same, and then just before the end, I'm going to set it to 0. So think of it like a little table top, it kind of comes up from 0 to 100. Then stays, stays, stays, then kind of drops down at the end there. Super Fade in. Holds for a while, then fades out. 

Let's say that we're happy with this. I just need to make sure-- my audio here needs to go at the bottom there. We can keep adding clips to it. Editing, but we've got the basics in there, right? Transitions, music, keyframing the position, which we did for the logo. Then keyframing the Opacity, which we did with this little lower thirds option here. Let's save it, we should have done that a long time ago. It's going to save mine to the desktop. 'Desktop'. And this is my 'InDesign, Intro'. It's going to be my 'v1'. 

Now we need to render this thing. Easy way is this option down the bottom here, this little arrow. Click on that. It's going to open up the Render window. It can look a little scary in here. First thing we're going to do is select a folder. I'm going to stick mine on my 'Desktop'. I'm going to give it a name, it's actually going to use the name of the PSD. And the big thing for you is the format. It should default to H.264. That crazy name is what gives you an mp4. Because I'm on a Mac I also have this QuickTime option. And for me, I've never used the DPX. If you're on a PC, you might have another option here, it might be AVI. This one here is the most common generic. Small file size, great quality. Plays on mobile, plays on websites, that's the one you want. Preset, 'High Quality'. You might lower this if you are maybe sending it via email first for maybe just a test. I'm going to leave it at 'High Quality'. It's using the size from the original document that I had. 

We don't need to change any of this. Let's click 'Render'. So we spent that up, that took probably a minute, maybe two. Basically I went and put water in the kettle, turned the kettle on. So I can have a cup of tea in a minute. What will make it go crazy long, in terms of Render would be to add things like Filters to your video, which you totally can. Just like we do any layer, click on it, say 'Filter', 'Apply Filter'. When it's doing stuff like that it can really slow it down. And obviously the longer the video, the more complex, the longer it takes to render. Let's see what's got created though, on my 'Desktop', there he is there, there's my mp4. How big is it? It is 83.8MB, big enough. Hit 'Space bar'. How cool is this? Wait for this to appear. 

So that's the skinny version of doing video in Photoshop. You can do everything you need, It's when you get to things where you need to bulk do stuff, that's where Photoshop kind of falls down, and for me, there's something called Easing. At the moment this transition here is just kind of chugs across the screen, goes chugga, chugga, chug. I want there to be a nice kind of inertia to it. Something called Easing or Interpolation. And that can only be done in Premiere. You can take it a little bit further with special effects in video, and go to something called Adobe After Effects. 

So if you like the idea of motion graphics or animated infographics, that is the home of After Effects. Premiere gets used when we're just doing some basic kind of edits like this, where we just got to cut, fix audio, needs to work fast, we need speed, workflow. That's what Pemiere's for, special effects though is for After Effects. Fixing audio, just so you know is another Adobe product, it's called Audition. That's when you need to maybe try and remove echoes, or kind of air conditioning noises, or background noises that are annoying. That's a job for Audition. 

So let's take our new found video skills, and show you some other uses for it in Photoshop. Next video we'll do Parallax, then we'll look at Cinemagraphs. Both very cool, let's do them in their own video. This video I think won the award for longest video in the course. If you've made it here you've won. You've not only made it to the end of a very long course, you've made it to the end of a very long video. High five. Let's get into the next video.