Creating a simple video from a photo in Photoshop

I am putting together a YouTube video to accompany a friend's music track using Wax. Making a basic slideshow by stringing a few photos together with transition effects is pretty simple, but not exactly exciting so I began exploring how Photoshop image filters can be sequentially applied to an image to quickly create short eye-catching video sequences. For example, this pulsating logo was made in about 20 minutes by repeatingly applying a 5% 'Spherize' filter a photo.

So, how was this made? First, the photo was clipped and resized to a 640 x 480 resolution image. A new Photoshop video file was then created with the same resolution using File > New.

The .jpg photograph was then added to the video file.

As the image became the 'background layer' it converted into a normal layer by right-clicking the layer in the layers window and selecting 'Layer from Background...'. The new 'layer 0' was made invisible, and then nine identical copies created by right-clicking the layer and selecting 'Duplicate Layer...'.

Nine additional frame were then added using 'Duplicate selected frame' (arrowed above). The first frame was then selected within which the first layer is made visible.

The second frame is now selected and the first layer made invisible and the second visible. The desired transformation is then applied to the second layer, in this case, Filter > Distort > Spherize, with 5% as the amount.

The last step is now repreated for the other frames, applying 10%, 15%, 20%, etc. filters to the respective image. This can be speed up by using Ctl-F to apply the last filter used to the selected layer, thus, you can just Ctl-F twice on the next frame-layer pair, three times on the third, etc.
Use the play controls in the 'Animation(Frames) window to view.

To write the video file, File > Export > Render Video. Exporting a 10 frame animation at 30 frames a second produces a smooth but very quick animation just 0.33 seconds long. Lowering the export frame rate to 5 does not increase the length of the animation by 6. Instead a jerky video 0.4 seconds long is produced. Setting a frame delay (in Photoshop click the small down arrow in a frame window) does increase video length, but again results in a jerky video determined by the delay time (this is how the video was made). Clearly, more frames and a slower rate of change is required. Time to look at Photoshop Actions.