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9.11.2008

Batch Actions

I was working on a photo montage today. The photos were huge--especially for DVD quality video--so I decided to shrink them all down so my NLE could handle them easier.

But with 500 images, is it really worth going through and resizing every one of the images just to save a little time zipping around the timeline?

Well, it depends on the project, but in this case, probably not.

But that doesn't mean I couldn't resize them all really easily. Photoshop has a really awesome feature called "Batch" processes. You can "record" yourself performing an action (or twenty) and then have the computer do exactly the same thing to every image in a folder and save the edited images in a new folder.

What's even better for an editor is that you can have Photoshop save the images with the same name in the new folder. That way, if you have already trimmed or arranged your photos in a timeline, it is a simple process to relink them to the new, smaller files.

Fantastic!

Want a brief introduction to the idea? There's a decent one here.

If you want more information or have any questions, just ask!

~Luke Holzmann
Your Media Production Mentor

2 comments :

Angela Fehr said...

I use Corel Photopaint and it has the Batch function too. However, most of the time I'm too lazy to run it! For the quantities of images I work with, it's not that important usually.

Luke Holzmann said...

It's true: Batch actions are only applicable in a few instances, but they are very powerful when you need to do the same thing a bunch of times.

~Luke