Tutorial: Page (1) of 1 - 02/15/06

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If you're an Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro 2.0 user, or if you have the Adobe Creative Suite Production Studio, you may not realize how easy it is to create and use Photoshop graphics within the timeline of Premiere. In this tutorial, we?ll make the round trip from Premiere to Photoshop and back, creating a graphic and then watching it dynamically change in Premiere as we modify it in Photoshop. Then, we'll see how layers created in Photoshop behave inside Premiere. Let?s fire up these two applications and see how well they work together.

Start by launching Premiere Pro and creating a new project. Lay a few shots down on Video 1 of the timeline, just so that we?ll have some video over which to key our graphic we?ll make in Photoshop.

Now, click on the text tool (it looks like the letter ?T? in the palette on the left) in Photoshop and type in a few characters. Then, bring in a JPEG graphic by dragging and dropping it into the Photoshop interface, and then use the selection tool (it?s a square shape in the top left of the palette) to highlight an area of that graphic, and then press Control-C to copy that selection. 

Next, Click on the title bar of your Photoshop file you created from within Premiere and type Control-V to paste what you just copied into your graphic. You now have a two-layer composition. Notice that the blue guides are useful, and that you're able to gently snap any graphics or text to any of them if you wish. Go ahead and play a bit now, adding other effects such as drop shadows and layers that you'd like to work with later in Premiere.

Next, click Save. It's important to do this, because if you don't click Save, the dynamic link won't be able to work when you go back to Premiere Pro.

Now, when you go back into Premiere Pro, you'll see your graphic right there in your Project Window with your other clips, with the title that you gave it.

Drag that file onto a track on the timeline that's above your clip that you placed on video track 1 earlier, and you'll see that it will immediately key over your video.

Now let's suppose that you don't like something about that graphic you just placed on the timeline. In this example, I think that typeface looks terrible?it's almost illegible, especially with that drop shadow that I added. So now, let's go back into Photoshop and change that typeface. Plus, I'll remove that drop shadow that looked so bad in this context. Note that after you make your changes, if you go back to Premiere Pro and you haven't saved the graphic in Photoshop, you won't see anything changed. As soon as you save that graphic in Photoshop (type Control/S is a keyboard shortcut), you'll see that graphic change in Premiere Pro.

Next, see how Photoshop layers behave within Premiere Pro. Start by re-importing that same graphic from Photoshop into Premiere Pro, except this time import it with its layers separate, so that we can animate them separately on the timeline in Premiere Pro. To do that, first make sure that your changes are saved in the graphic that you made in Photoshop, then in Premiere, Select File/Import and then navigate to that Photoshop graphic file that you created.

When you select that graphic, it will give you a choice of importing it as either footage or a sequence (see graphic above), and then whether you'd like to import the merged layers or choose one layer to import. For this exercise, we?ll select Import as Footage. Then select Choose Layer, and then select the layer of the text that you created. Once you're done with that, go through that same import process again, and this time select the other layer (or layers) you created within Photoshop. Now here's where the real fun starts -- you have all those layers as separate files in Premiere Pro and can animate them separately as you wish. 

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