94. Frame Your Video with an Image  BEFORE YOU BEGIN
22 Prepare a Still for Video 23 Scale and Position a Still
 SEE ALSO
33 Add or Move a Clip on the Timeline 43 About Rendering the Timeline
94. Frame Your Video with an Image 
The alpha channel travels, usually invisibly, along with the red, green, and blue color channels in a graphic or video clip. However, unlike the color channels, the alpha channel designates transparency, communicating which areas of a clip are transparent and which areas are opaque. A layered Photoshop document (PSD), or a PDF or TIF document that has no background layer and in which the graphics do not completely fill the frame, carries its non-filled areas as an alpha channel. When you place these types of graphic files into Premiere Elements, the alpha channel remains intact, and these unfilled areas are read as transparent, revealing the clip or clips on the video tracks below.  NOTE
The graphics that make up many of the Title templates and DVD templates and menus are, in fact, layered Photoshop documents with no backgrounds and their transparency areas are carried as alpha channels.
Any graphic or photo with the alpha channel enabled can be used as a frame for your video clips. 1. | Create a Frame with No Background
With Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or whatever graphics program you are using, create a multi-layered graphic. (In Photoshop Elements, double-click the Background layer in the Layers panel to turn the background into a layer that can be deleted, leaving you with a transparent canvas.)
Create a graphic with a window cut through it. This window should be completely transparent, showing whatever your graphics program uses to indicate no background behind it (in this example from Photoshop Elements, the transparent background is indicated by a gray-and-white checkerboard pattern).
Save your frame as a Photoshop (PSD), PDF, or a TIF document with layers enabled. The transparent background travels with these file formats as an alpha channel.
| 2. | Place Your Clip on Video 1
Add the video clip you want to frame on a lower video track (such as Video 1) on the Timeline.
| 3. | Place Your Frame on Video 2
Add your frame graphic to the Media panel using the Add Media button (as explained in 13 About the Media Panel) and then drag the graphic to the Timeline and place it on the video track directly above the clip you want to frame (on Video 2 in this example). Your clip is visible through the transparent area of the frame graphic.
Depending on how much of your screen your frame graphic covers, you might have to adjust the Scale setting in the Properties panel for the clip on Video 1 to keep too much of it from being covered. (See 68 About the Properties Panel.)
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