Chapter 10

How to Edit Video

It Does It Better Than You’d Think

If you’re thinking, “What?! Photoshop can edit video?!” Well, actually not only can it edit video, it does a pretty decent job of it to boot. Well, from a photographer’s standpoint, it does just what we need it to do—it puts video clips and stills together on a timeline, it lets us add background music and even a voice-over on top of that if we’d like, it lets us use simple transitions, and it’s a great tool for doing things like making short wedding videos, or making a quick promo for your studio, or even a 30- or 60-second commercial for a client. What it’s not great for is making a major motion picture, and while it’s true that the 2015 Hollywood hit movie Bridge of Spies (starring Courteney Cox and Carrot Top) was edited entirely using other much more expensive software, they certainly could have chosen to use Photoshop to edit the movie. Of course, if they had chosen to go that route, it wouldn’t have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture (like it was in 2015) because it still wouldn’t have been released—while Photoshop is well-suited to editing short videos, if you tried to edit a major motion picture (or even Hot Tub Time Machine 2), you would become suicidal during just the opening title sequence because . . . well . . . it just ain’t made for that stuff. I guess, technically, you could make a bunch of mini-movies, all as separate documents, and then somehow try to copy-and-paste it all together. But, the director of Bridge of Spies is Steven Spielberg, and I have a feeling that after watching you stumble around trying to make it all work within Photoshop, not only would he fire you, but he would get your whole family simultaneously fired from their jobs, too. Before long, you’d be back to editing short wedding videos, just trying to feed everybody, so why don’t you save us all a lot of aggravation and just let Mr. Spielberg choose which video editing program to use. See, was that so hard?