Photoshop Tutorial: Turn your still images into video and display it on iPod

In the occasion of the Hayah Film Competition that will held along the side of the first Middle East International Film Festival, I present this very easy to follow tutorial to create your own short movie with sound using your own digital camera, and export it as an iPod compatible movie all within Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. If you have a city view from your house or apartment, you can start your time lapse shooting session from your balcony from the early daylight throughout the day till late night with a snapshot taken every half an hour or so without moving your camera ofcourse. Following steps could be done in iMovie but it takes longer than Photoshop, the big advantage of using photoshop is that we can process one shot and apply enhancement steps on the rest of the shots. Make sure you have a compatible image format like tiff, jpg

STEP ONE:
View the time lapse images you want to convert into a movie clip, make sure they are named/numbered in logical time sequence, here I used Adobe Bridge in this step. I have also converted the RAW images into jpg format for my next step.

STEP TWO:
Now that we have the images ready to import into Photoshop, we shall open first image of the lot (the top most), notice the check box Image Sequence at the bottom of the window, tick it. By making your images as Image Sequence, Photoshop will create a video layer with all images inside it. Press Open button.

STEP THREE:
Photoshop will request us to choose a frame rate, you may choose any frame rate you deem suitable, however ideally a 30 frame per second ratio is good for most projects. Press OK.

STEP FOUR:
the image should open and display our first time lapse frame. Press the space bar to play the clip, then space bar again to pause. Notice the film icon in the Layers Panel.

STEP FIVE:
Since this is a movie clip, you can bring in the Animation Panel from Window menu. Timeline is now available inside Photoshop CS3 Extended. Hit the spacebar again to play you time lapse video.
Remember your images were taken by a still digital camera so you can still zoom into the details of your image in a better way than if you shoot with best video camera out there. Your video could become actually a Hight Definition video when you shoot with an SLR.

STEP SIX:
Thanks to Dr. Brown of Adobe who demonstrated how to add sound layer in Photoshop now we are able to add sound to our movie. In Photoshop go to File > Open, make sure you select All Documents from the Enable drop menu, choose your sound file, then select QuickTime Movie from the Format drop menu. Click Open.

STEP SEVEN:
Last step we opened a sound file in Photoshop, the document looks empty ofcourse, now we shall drag the only layer in this document onto our original document. Close sound document without saving it.

STEP EIGHT:
Back to our original time lapse document, make sure your Animation Panel is still open, hold down the option/alt key and press Play button in the time line to play movie with sound. You can adjust the start and end of sound in timeline if you wish.

STEP NINE:
Now we need to export the time lapse clips into a video suitable for iPod viewing. From File menu choose Export > Render Video…
Name your video, select a destination folder, then choose iPod from the QuickTime Export drop menu. Leave other settings as they are. Press Render button.

by Zaid Al-Hilali