Adobe Digital Video How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques with Adobe Production Studio

#61 Creating Titles in Photoshop

Here are seven high-level concepts that you'll need to know to design titles (and other content) in Photoshop for use in Premiere Pro.

• You create your Photoshop file from within Premiere Pro (File > New > Photoshop File). This ensures that the file is the proper format, size, and aspect ratio to use on your timeline.

• Transparent areas in Photoshop will be transparent in Premiere Pro.

• Changes made to a Photoshop file that has been imported into Premiere Pro will automatically appear in Premiere Pro each time you save the file.

• To edit a PSD file imported into Premiere Pro, select the file in the Project panel or timeline, right-click it, and choose Edit in Photoshop.

• When you create your Photoshop file in Premiere Pro (as described in the first item on this list), Premiere Pro merges all layers in the PSD file, so you can't access individual layers to animate them or apply other effects.

• To access the layers, you have two alternatives. The fastest and easiest is to reimport the file (File > Import) and choose Sequence from the drop-down menu in the Import Layered File dialog (Figure 61a).

  Figure 61a. When Premiere Pro imports a Photoshop file as a sequence, you can edit and animate the individual layers.

  When you import the PSD file as a sequence, Premiere Pro creates a sequence (essentially a separate timeline) and inserts all layers separately on that sequence. This is shown in the Project panel in Figure 61b and on the timeline in Figure 61c.

  Figure 61b. Here are the layers in the Project panel.

  Figure 61c. Here are the layers in the Sequence open on the timeline.

  Since each layer is preserved separately in the sequence, you can animate or edit each layer as desired. To deploy the title, drag the sequence (rather than an individual layer) to the timeline to the target location. Once applied, the title sequence is called a nested sequence. You can access the nested sequence by double-clicking the sequence on the timeline or in the Project panel.

• The second alternative for importing a layer is to choose Footage from the drop-down menu in the Import Layered File dialog, and choose the desired layer. This imports just that layer as a separate piece of content. This is useful if you want to apply just one layer, or if you want to import each layer separately and work with the layers as regular image content, rather than a nested sequence.

  Figure 61d. Import one layer at a time if you want to work with them as ordinary image content.