Hi, my name is Rich Harrington and welcome to this edition of the Photoshop CS4 Sneak Peek. Now, there are a lot of great things you could do at Photoshop extended including work with video files.
Now, we are going to use both some video files that are actually movies as well as talk about sizing some graphics for a video. Let us start with that second one there. Making a video for graphic that is ready from a photo.
I am going ahead and open up an image here by double clicking and it is going to open it into Photoshop. Now, what we are going to do is take this image and drop it into a video size document. The easiest way to do that is to choose file menu and from the preset list specify film and video category.
Once we have done that we can choose a size that we need including digital video sizes, standard definition sizes, PAL, high depth grading film. Let us go ahead with an HD size using the DVCPRO HD for 720p from Panasonic. We will click okay and you will notice that the pixel aspect ratio is down below here.
Photoshop is going to take care of the correct pixel aspect ratio for you and this is great. If you have been using this feature in older versions of Photoshop, you may notice when you open some of your graphics that you did not air a message, you are going to see that in just one second. We are going to click okay here.
It warns us that this is for preview purposes only. Do not worry about that, click okay and we can now simply copy and paste. Select all, copy, switch over, paste. Now, the great news is that all of the non-square pixels have been taken advantage of on its own. Photoshop transforms the image for you and converts to the right non-square pixels.
We go and scale this as needed. I am going to go up just a little bit. I am going to give it to slight enlargement and we will drop that as put. Now, one of the things that I want to call your attention is that if you go over here to the image menu, you will not see anything about pixel aspect ratio.
That is because Adobe correctly moved it to the new menu and this is something I have been lobbying for a while. When you are using the pixel aspect ratio command inside the Photoshop, you are not actually converting the image rather you are interpreting the image so that is where the view menu comes into play.
You go over to view here and you will see that it has a pixel aspect ratio assigned and normally these are sign when you create the document. If you open up a frame graph that you have exported from the video program, it looks distorted then you are going over here to view and pick the correct aspect ratio for the particular video tape format that that image came from.
You also can toggle off pixel aspect ratio correction. When you do that, the image will look a bit distorted but you get a higher quality image so that pixel aspect ratio preview is just that it, it is a preview.
We are going to have a little softening with the image particularly with texts but the good news is that Adobe made this preview quality much higher in CS4. So, in earlier versions of Photoshop, if you saw a little bit of softening and it bothered you we will get less of that with Photoshop CS4 because they are improving.
Also, be sure if you have got a video system hooked up to your computer using fire wire but you take advantage of the ability to do a preview and this will allow you to send out the image over fire wire and looked at it on 16 x 9 or a 4 x 3 monitor and it will actually do the pixel aspect ratio preview there and correct the image to the monitor for you. Go and close that right now.
If you get an air message when you go to open up an image that is because Photoshop made some subtle changes and actually it was just not Photoshop. It was the entire Adobe creative line. You used to use the number like 0.9 when you are working with digital video to indicate the pixel aspect ratio, well, the engineers of Adobe refined that just a little bit.
Let us go to Photoshop and choosing your document and you will notice for example, on NTSC DV it is still 720 x 480, but the pixel aspect ratio is 0.91. Same thing down here, instead of 1.2 for wide screen, it is 1.21. Now, that is a hundredth of a decimal and you are not really going to see that. If you do, call me because I would like to hire you for a job because you see things that I cannot but what is going on here is a subtle change to how the pixels are interpreted.
So, if you open up an older Photoshop project that you used on script pixels, it is going to update the graphic when you open it up but changed should be imperceptible but it is a slight change that makes it a just little bit a better scaling in output when you are using those nonscript pixels with video.
Now, speaking of video what about using a video file inside of Photoshop, let us go ahead and choose file open and we are going to grab our selves a video file actually an open tool over here. Actually, I will open all three here, three separate documents. Now, it is giving some worrying about the pixel aspect ratio that is a whole thing there where they made that subtle change at a hundred over percentage point there. Do not worry about that, just click okay. You will not notice the difference but it fixes in.
And let us start with this first layer. When you copy animation timeline so we could see that and this will give us our controls. Now, when working here, you want to make sure that you actually have the sound turned on for the layer and globally here for the timeline. What is cool now is that when we press play, it will actually start to cast the frames and you could hear the audio.
This may not matter for some clips, if you are working with a clip where the audio does not matter just turned that off and it will start to cast the frames but sometimes the audio does matter especially if you are doing a motion graphics project and you are using Photoshop extended animation capabilities, we want to synchronize things up to the sound or maybe you are trying to find exact part within a sound byte, all you have to do is affix.
Still regardless of what you need it for, it is great to have audio built in right here. So, you got a clip with audio and you go to export and it is going to be there. It is going to come in. You could hear it and we export and goes right back up so, now having the sync things up later.
There you see it there. Let us go ahead and cast. Let us go and turn the speaker icon back on and you will see here it plays smoothly. If you want to you could actually de-interlace and release the clip. So, if we go to layer, video layers, interpret footage, you can actually go ahead and de-interlace it.
In this case, I will say used the lower field and duplicate. I will click okay there. You will see we get clearer of an image. So, great flexibility as a design option when we are working with it. Let us go and switch to new video right here and I want to take advantage of some filters.
Now, this image looks pretty good but what I would like to do is actually stylized it a bit. Normally, when you run a filter on a video frame, it is going to go just to that individual frame but if you convert the video there to a smarter object then you get smarter filters. Let us go and right click and say, this a smart object which it does, still preserves all the video aspects of that layer and then we could say filter, stylized, glowing edges and this filter by default gives you sort of a little bit slow, we will make those edges a little bit wider and click okay.
But remember, we can go ahead and double click here on the blending options and play with those. For example, screen is going to knock that down and we could tweak the opacity here and get a nice edge effect, certainly of a cartoon type filter. Let us combine that here with another filter, filter, sketch, note paper, play with the image bounds to get a nice mix, take the gradient down and then relieve up and then double click to blend that.
Let us turn the glowing edges off for a second, just do the note paper. We will set that to overlay, click okay, turn glowing edges back on and we will just reverse the stocking order
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