In a departure from traditional articles on Photoshop, this article will provide a look at how to save movies for the purpose of distribution to Macintosh, Windows and Linux operating systems.

More than once, I have been asked to produce and help with the distribution of digital videos that rival those downloadable trailers for big Hollywood productions. I kindly inform the clients that I do not have a staff large enough to tweak each individual frame of their video, and that their expectation must go down a few notches. Upon seeing their baffled look, an explanation ensues, much like what follows:

First of all, digital video must be compressed in order to run seamlessly from a computer. Only the most robust computers can keep up with the number of frames flashing by per second (-30 frames for NTSC), and even these cannot play back for extended periods of time without the loss of some frames (what is called dropped frames in the digital editing world).