- Transitions
- Adjusting Video Speed and Duration
- Working with Multiple Video Tracks
- Using Blend Modes
- Adding Polish to the Video
- Combining Two Video Documents
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Combining Two Video Documents
So far you have created a series of stacked videos with transitions. You also cut up a basic interview at the end of the last chapter. In this section, you are going to combine the two together to start to tell a story and finesse the video’s timing and sequence. In the next steps, you’ll combine footage from a beach scene with an interview.
- Open interview.psd from the ch4 folder in your downloaded files.
- Rename Video Group 1 as interview as shown in Figure 4.29. It’s important to have unique names for video groups; otherwise, you won’t be able to copy them to another document that has a group with the same name. Leave this document open.
Figure 4.29. Rename the video group and collapse it by clicking the triangle by its name in the Layers panel.
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If for any reason, you receive a “Cannot locate missing media” warning, read the “Saving and Managing Projects” section in Chapter 3 to learn about relinking files.
- Now open ch4-end.psd from the Ch4 folder (or use the file you were working on in the previous steps). Place the playhead on frame one. You should see a blank Video Group2. If not, create a new blank video group by clicking on the filmstrip to the right of the Timeline name and choosing New Video Group.
- Click on the blank video group to select it as shown in Figure 4.30. The transferred clips will go into this group.
Figure 4.30. Make sure a blank video group is selected at the top of the Timeline.
- Choose Window > Arrange > 2-up Vertical. You will now see both document windows side by side in Photoshop as shown in Figure 4.31.
Figure 4.31. Splitting the window view into two panes.
- Click the Interview document’s tab at the top to activate it. Click the interview Video Group icon in the Layers panel. Shift-drag the icon into the second window (Figure 4.32). Pressing the Shift key ensures that the video clips are properly centered in the destination document.
Figure 4.32. Dragging the contents of one document into another.
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In the real world, I might have built all of these assets into the same document. The reason I built them separately and then joined the projects is so that you can learn this as a possible workflow. For example, you might have different people collaborating on a project in a pipeline workflow. Or, perhaps the file is too big and getting bogged down, so you build the parts separately and then put them together to preserve system resources.
- Release the mouse and the clips from the interview are added to the Timeline of the ch4-end.psd document.
Close the original interview document as it’s not needed anymore. Your screen should look like Figure 4.33.
Figure 4.33. The clips from the interview are added to the working project.
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Editing an Interview with Footage
Now that you have the interview footage combined with the beach material, it’s a matter of arranging and massaging things around. I’ll show you a few tricks that help make a decent interview cut. There will also be a few workarounds that you can employ to make Photoshop do what’s needed.
In addition, you’re going to add a photograph as a slide to add some visual interest to the presentation. It will also show you that we can work with many types of animated media in Photoshop.
You should have a file of combined interview and beach footage from the steps in the previous section.
- Click on the filmstrip on the left of the Timeline and choose New Video Group from the menu (Figure 4.34). If new video group is not at the top of the stack, drag it to the top by either dragging the Video Track name in the Timeline or in the Layers panel.
Figure 4.34. Creating a new video group.
- Click the Plus button on the right of the Timeline to add media. Navigate to the Ch4 folder of your downloaded files and choose pic-beach-sunset2.jpg. Click Open (Figure 4.35).
Figure 4.35. Selecting the beach photo to add to the presentation.
- Begin to drag some of the clips around to arrange things. The first clip of the interview goes all the way to the left. (If you want, trim the beginning slightly as there is a couple seconds of silence.)
Select all three video clips of the beach shots. Command/Ctrl-click to select multiple clips. Drag those clips to the right, toward the end of the first interview clip as you see in Figure 4.36.
Figure 4.36. Moving multiple clips together.
- Drag the photo clip toward the end of the first interview clip and expand it if necessary by dragging on the edge of the clip to make it last about 5 seconds (Figure 4.37).
Figure 4.37. Positioning the photographic slide.
- Play the video through a few times, adjusting the timing of the interview clips and the clips underneath until the timing feels good (Figure 4.38). Take the visibility of the last two interview clips to zero by adjusting the opacity in the Layers panel.
Figure 4.38. Setting the timing for all the clips.
If you want to adjust a clip, don’t forget to place the playhead over it.
By reducing the opacity, you can keep the audio playing for those clips but allow the imagery to show from underneath instead of the talking head.
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Why did we reduce the opacity of the videos rather than hide them by turning off their layer visibility (by clicking the eye icons)? If you turn off layer visibility, it also mutes the audio. If you want to hear only the audio and hide the clips, reduce the layer opacity to zero.
- Before we finish the project, let’s add one little extra piece of visual goodness and animate the slide using a Timeline effect. I’ll spare you the explanation here because we go deep into this in Chapter 8, “Creating Engaging Multimedia Slideshows.” Right-click/Ctrl-click the Purple photo clip to display a Motion window. Choose Pan as the Motion Preset and click away to apply it (Figure 4.39). Now when you play the Timeline, you’ll see there is a nice motion effect on the photograph that adds to the sizzle.
Figure 4.39. Adding a Motion Preset to the photograph.
- Figure 4.40 shows the final adjusted Timeline. Notice that you have added a fade transition to the first interview. I have also added a fade transition to the photograph so that it fades gently into the video footage.
Figure 4.40. The final project so far. Look at the Layers panel and the Timeline to make sure your document matches.
- Open ch4-interview-end.psd from the Ch4 folder to see the final result.
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In this chapter, we’ve covered a lot of ground as far as more advanced editing goes. You still need to work on color, adjustments, filters, and sound to complete the project, but we’ll turn to adjusting footage in the next chapter.