If you use Photoshop to create still images, you can
use Premiere Pro to make them move and change. You can animate an
entire image or any of its layers.
You can edit individual frames of video and image sequence files
in Photoshop. In addition to using any Photoshop tool to edit and
paint on video, you can also apply filters, masks, transformations,
layers styles, and blending modes. You can paint using the Clone
Stamp, Pattern Stamp, Healing Brush, or Spot Healing Brush. You
can also edit video frames using the Patch tool.
In Photoshop, with the Clone Stamp, you can sample a frame from
a video layer and paint with the sampled source onto another video
frame. As you move to different target frames, the source frame
changes relative to the frame from which you initially sampled.
After making edits, you can save the video as a PSD file, or
you can render it as a QuickTime movie or image sequence. You can
import any of these back into Premiere Pro for further editing.
If you use Premiere Pro to create movies, you can use Photoshop
to refine the individual frames of those movies. You can remove
unwanted visual elements, draw on individual frames, or use the
superior selection and masking tools in Photoshop to divide a frame
into elements for animation or compositing.
Comparative advantages for specific tasks
The
strengths of Premiere Pro lie in its numerous video editing features.
You can use it to combine Photoshop files with video clips, audio
clips and other assets, using the Photoshop files, for example,
as titles, graphics, and masks.
In contrast, Photoshop has
excellent tools for painting, drawing, and selecting portions of
an image. Tracing a complex shape to create a mask is much easier with
the Photoshop Quick Selection tool or Magnetic Lasso tool than with
the masking tools in Premiere Pro. Rather than hand-drawing a mask
on each frame in Premiere Pro, consider doing this work in Photoshop.
Similarly, if you are applying several paint strokes by hand to
get rid of dust, consider using the Photoshop paint tools.
The
animation and video features in Photoshop Extended include simple keyframe-based
animation. Premiere Pro, however, provides quite a bit more keyframe
control over various properties.
Exchanging still images
Premiere Pro can
import and export still images in many formats, but you will usually
want to use the native Photoshop PSD format when transferring individual
frames or still image sequences from Photoshop to Premiere Pro.
When
importing a PSD file, Premiere Pro can preserve individual layers
and masks. When you import a PSD file into Premiere Pro, you can
choose whether to import it as a flattened image, or with its layers
separate and intact.
It is often a good idea to prepare a
still image in Photoshop before importing it into Premiere Pro.
Examples of such preparation include correcting color, scaling, and
cropping. It is often better to make a change to a source image
in Photoshop than to have Premiere Pro perform the same operation
many times per second as it renders each frame for previews or final
output.
By creating your new PSD document from the Photoshop
New File dialog box with a Film & Video preset, you can start
with a document that is set up correctly for a specific video output
type. If you are already working in Premiere Pro, you can create
a new PSD document that matches your composition and sequence settings
by choosing File > New > Photoshop File.
Exchanging movies
You can also exchange
video files, such as QuickTime movies, between Photoshop and Premiere
Pro. When you open a movie in Photoshop, a video layer is created
that refers to the source footage file. Video layers allow you to paint
nondestructively on the movie’s frames. When you save a PSD file
with a video layer, you are saving the edits that you made to the
video layer, not edits to the source footage itself.
You can
also render a movie directly from Photoshop. For example, you can create
a QuickTime movie from Photoshop that can then be imported into Premiere
Pro.
Color
Premiere Pro works internally with
colors in an RGB (red, green, blue) color space. If you want to
edit video clips you create in Photoshop in Premiere Pro, you should
create them in RGB.
If relevant for your final output, it
is better to ensure that the colors in your image are broadcast-safe
in Photoshop before you import the image into Premiere Pro. A good
way to do this is to assign the appropriate destination color space—for example,
SDTV (Rec. 601)—to the document in Photoshop.
