Unable to create video layers on photoshop (Mac)

[Nathaniel5FD0]

Hello!

I have been using photoshop for school for a time now, and in one of my class we have recently started doing simple animations using film & video canvases, the motion workspace and everything that comes with it. So far everything went smoothly, until a few days ago. I cannot seem to figure out why, but in the layer option, the video layers section does not appear anymore. Furthermore, when I press on "create frame animation", the timeline always appears as uneditable and it appears as a single cube of the background of the document. I see the option to open the normal timeline but it is not functional. I have tried opening photoshop documents with which i successfully created animations without these issues, but they now open with the same issue of me being unable to create video layers, and all the ones that are present on my projects are now unusable. I really don't know what to do here.

I have attached screenshots, hopefully they will help

[mark@headTrix]

hi there

So first things first. You have to always make sure you save your work, sometimes I even save out versions of my work so I can always go back. And in Photoshop you also have like a default of 50 history states so you can always press Command + Z (Ctrol + Z on PC).

Finally, there are two types of timelines in Photoshop, a video timeline (for Video) and a frame animation timeline to create Animated GIFs. So somehow you converted the timeline to a Frame Animation which gets rid of the video and leaves you with a still frame. 

you might be better starting over... just go to File>Open and select your video... it will open in the video timeline. 
Then you can add more layers of text or whatever you were trying to add to the video.

Hope this helped.

Best,

mark

[Nathaniel5FD0]

I've tried starting over a few times, but every time I create a new file I just never get the video layer option in the layer menu on the top menu bar. 

[mark@headTrix]

if you just OPEN the movie it will open up in the timeline and create a video group layer automatically.

Just file open.. no file> new.... with nothing open at all... select File>Open and select your video.

Let me know how it works out.

best,

mark