Adding Titles to MOV videos inside PHOTOSHOP??

September 6, 2012 8:59 PM

A friend of mine claims that he has "loaded a video into Photoshop CS5" and added overlaid Title graphics to his video as Photoshop layers, but now has trouble saving the video because of a problem with "Adobe Media Converter CS5".

First of all, Holy Crud! I did not know that you could do basic video edits inside Photoshop. Can that possibly be true? Could someone post a link to a "Working with Videos inside Photoshop" tutorial? Second of all, he says he has not yet successfully been able to Export a Quicktime/Video, or Save it, using whatever fanciness he claims to have done with the title graphics. Could he just be flat-out wrong, and you cannot in fact add a layer to a video inside of Photoshop, even the latest and greatest version of it?

posted by shipbreaker to technology (6 answers total)

It's been possible since at least CS3, although the caveat is you need the Extended edition. Here's a quick rundown for CS3 & CS4; CS5 is essentially the same IIRC.

I think that in the standard edition you can import a video, move around to a particular frame, and edit it - but can only save or export that frame as an image, not as video.
posted by Pinback at 9:22 PM on September 6, 2012

This is certainly a thing that can be done. Go to Window/Timeline and you'll be able to scrub through the video frame-by-frame. You can even do some animation there.

I can't say what the problem with Converter is. Depending what he's doing with the resulting video, he may be able to export an image sequence instead, which could work if he had a problem with a video codec.
posted by RobotHero at 10:00 PM on September 6, 2012

Edit video in Photoshop
posted by unliteral at 10:04 PM on September 6, 2012

I use Photoshop in this capacity on a near daily basis for rotoscope. Although I have never had an export problem, I second RobotHero's "export as image sequence" as a workaround.

One thing to try is a small, say 320x240 movie of a few seconds in length and try to export that just to see if there may be a problem with the specific file or source media.

Also, is the image size in some non-standard size such as, say, 879x463? Some codecs are very unhappy about weird sizes (such as Cineform).
posted by bz at 11:48 AM on September 7, 2012

When I say a 320x240 movie of a few seconds in length, I mean a new one without any of the media involved in the one that won't export.
posted by bz at 11:49 AM on September 7, 2012

Is he using the trial version? I had problems with the trial version of Premiere not including all codecs so this could be something similar.
posted by KateViolet at 4:26 PM on September 7, 2012