Photoshop for Video Editors

Richard Harrington

Expand your ability to take full advantage of this ubiquitous but
underused tool

Although almost every video editor owns a copy of Adobe Photoshop,
many are not as efficient with the program as they could be.

To some extent, that's because Photoshop is a deep program that
takes a long time to learn, explains Richard Harrington, Program
Manager for the NAB Post|Production World Conference. Beyond that,
however, is the fact that Photoshop's video capabilities simply aren't
well documented. "If you open up a Photoshop manual and look up the
word video, it appears only three times, and only one of those
is actually in reference to video," says Harrington. "There's nothing
in the Photoshop manual about using the software with Premiere or After
Effects."

Despite that oversight, Photoshop remains an important tool for
video professionals, and to help video pros further develop their
Photoshop skills, Harrington is serving as Technical Chair for a
conference track entitled "Photoshop for Nonlinear Editors." The track
includes nine Photoshop-related sessions that will run over the course
of three days, starting Sunday, April 18.

Richard Harrington

Harrington says attendees might find the Photoshop sessions
particularly useful this year, given all the new video-related features
Adobe included in the latest version of the program, Photoshop CS,
which began shipping in November. For instance, the new version
supports non-square pixels, enabling video editors to create images
using preset, video-standard sizes, including automatic action-safe and
title-safe guides, and to view those images as they would appear on
their destination devices.

"It's really a whole new Photoshop," says Harrington.

One session Harrington feels will be especially important to users
is "500%: the Power to Automate Using Actions, Automation, and
Scripts." Scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, the session will
focus on Photoshop's tools for speeding up workflow.

"Video editing is very repetitive," says Harrington. "Little tasks
can take up your time. For example, oftentimes you'll have a bunch of
pictures that you need to resize for a video, or you'll have to do a
common color correction on an entire roll of pictures. In this session,
we'll be looking at some of the new efficiency features that let you do
things like take entire folders of images and set them up to be
processed."

Another session that's one of Harrington's favorites is "Photoshop
for Documentaries," scheduled for 3:00 p.m. on Monday, April 19. A key
part of this session, says Harrington, will be a discussion on how to
take static photos and add motion to them.

"It's a great way to turn out an exciting video, even when your
client hasn't given you much to work with," says Harrington. "You can
take what essentially would be a slide show and add movement and life
to it."

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