PTE and Video Editing with Photoshop CS6

[wideangle]

At some point, as and when I can afford it, I will consider moving up to Photoshop CS6, having read lots of favourable comments about it.

One area which has caught my eye is the ability to handle video editing with the traditional timeline and transitions, and also to be able to apply the Photoshop tools of levels, curves, adjustment layers and smart objects etc etc.

I suppose I'm really just asking for comments and thoughts from anyone who uses these features, and whether resulting videos are directly compatible with and exportable to PTE.

Regards,

wideangle

[Guest Yachtsman1]

I use Elements 10 for some of my still editing, so I tried the free trial Premier. However, after trying that & a number of other freebies I find I can do all the video editing I want within PTE. Q have you tried PTE's video editing, I believe the free trail of Premier will be very similar to CS6, might be worth trying that first before shelling out?

Yachtsman1.

[wideangle]

Hi yachtsman1

Obviously I wouldn't buy Photoshop CS6 just for its video editing! Given enough pennies in the pocket I would buy it for all sorts of other reasons.

I think Premiere is a different ball game altogether.

No, I was just wondering what the video editing features were like, and the direct compatibility with PTE, by getting the thoughts of people who have already used them.

I keep seeing these comments about loading videos into PTE then finding they do not work as expected, so someone else suggests using various video converters to solve the problem.

Seems a bit messy to me.

Regards,

wideangle

[fh1805]

Thus far I've only been "dipping my toe in the water" of including video in my sequences. From what I have read here on the forum, and elsewhere on the Internet, the problem seems to me to be that there are too many different video formats. Each hardware manufacturer seems to want to "lock in" the consumer to their products, so they have their own format. The big software companies definitely would like to "lock in" the consumer to their product range too, so they each have their own format. The technology, both hardware and software, is developing at an ever-increasing rate, so today's format is obsolescent tomorrow and obsolete the day after. Add to all that the fact that each video format could, potentially, be implemented using several different codecs and you have a right old rat's nest to disentangle.

Applying the principle of "K.I.S.S.", I suspect the way to avoid the worst of these "incompatability" issues is to find out which formats/codecs are favoured by the software that is most important to you (that's PTE of course!) and then seek out cameras that capture video using one of those favoured formats/codecs.

My Nikon D300s captures video using MJPEG codec into an AVI container. PTE converts this very happily into MPEG4 codec in an AVI container. That data was obtained using File Info (Ctrl+I) on video files in the PTE File List panel. I can see no difference between an original video and its converted equivalent - except for its length; and that's because I use PTE to do the trimming to the length I want. If I set up four trim operations and then run the conversion, they run in parallel on my quad-core system - which saves a significant amount of time.

I'm not implying that my way will work for others, but it gives me all I need at present.

Peter

[bjc]

wideangle,

There is no doubt that the video editing capabilities of CS6 should not be ignored.

That of course is dependent on what capabilities you are after.

If basic file format conversion and file length cropping are all that you require, then CS6 is not really needed.

If you would like to have the additional option of ALL the modifications made possible by conventional Photoshop Layer techniques / the use of Masks / Adjustment Layers etc. etc. etc ~ with the added functionality of being able to 'animate' those Layers, Masks and Adjustments (position / opacity / visibility etc) then CS6 offers all these extra features and more.

If you are up-to-speed with Photoshop ~ using Layers / the use of Adjustment Layers / and Masks etc ~ then there is very little else you will need to learn when 'tweaking' a movie in CS6 (apart from understanding the use of the 'timeline' if you wish to include the animation of your various elements).

CS6 takes your video editing possibilities and control to a whole new level ~ which is FANTASTIC !! ~ but only if that is what you want to do ~ otherwise it's just overkill.

bjc