5 Things You Need to Know About Camtasia 2021

good morning good afternoon good evening everybody i am matt pierce the learning and video ambassador here from techsmith and today we are going to be talking about the newest version of camtasia camtasia 2021. if you hadn't heard it just released a couple weeks ago we're going to be going through some of the awesome new features we might even talk about a few things that are old that you just didn't even know about just because in the process of showing off some of these things and later in the show i'm going to let you know that we're going to have a guest join us jason vlad who is an instructional designer master trainer if you've been to some of our camtasia webinars you may have uh heard from jason you've maybe taken a training from him he's going to be joining us to go over some of his uh top features as well but we're in the meantime before he joins us we're gonna be talking about some of the new things so i have been at techsmith for a very long time i've used camtasia for a very long time i think the first version of camtasia i ever used was camtasia studio we still use studio in the title and it was version 3 i believe so i've seen a lot of iterations that was in 2006 uh so i can tell you i've been playing with this more and more lately uh and really digging into these features in preparation for today's show and i am i'm just really really thrilled to be able to show off some of these things because i i think uh i mean it's always easy to say this is the best release ever but i think these things are so awesome so we're gonna we're gonna dive right into them if you do have questions comments thoughts if you're watching live go ahead and put those in the chat if you're listening to the podcast later on you might want to go check out the video on youtube or on linkedin or facebook it's gonna be fairly uh visual today but we'll try to describe things so you can still get value out of these features and hearing what they can do for you as you're building your projects in camtasia so where we're gonna start we've got at least five things we're going to cover today the the first thing i want to start off by talking about we're going to and i'm going to show that to you in just a second but we're going to start talking about what's called proxy video and the reason i want i want to explain this concept first because it's it's something i think it's it's new if you're not heavily into video editors uh you haven't done a lot of video editing but it's super cool so let's kind of lay out an example here let's say you're working with a project and it's got really large video files for instance you've got a dslr camera you're bringing in that footage maybe you've got a really big screen recording and maybe you've noticed sometimes uh video playback and those situations in the editor is a little choppy a little bit slow and partly that's because you're dealing with such big files it's trying to keep track of everything and change you might see it stutter what proxy video is going to do is when you use proxy video it's basically going to make a lower quality version for inside of the editor however when you go to produce it's still going to produce at the high quality it's just going to say like we're going to make this a little bit less quality for your editing purposes just because it doesn't need to be perfect right now uh we'll make that a little bit smoother of an experience we're going to make that a lot better and then what proxy video is going to allow you to do is when you produce you still get the best quality so let me show you what we're talking about here though let me just go ahead and bring up this is a project file i have done some insane things that no person should ever actually probably do i've got if you look at my timeline here you'll see that i've got 10 tracks of very long videos and i did trim this a little bit so we're talking these are uh at least 15 minute long videos all of this previous episodes of the show i've stacked them up on top of each other i'm not going to hit play because the audio is we're going to get to that we're going to get to that but i want to come down to this uh you can see here is just that i'm playing back it's you know i've got a lot going on so it's always kind of hard to tell is that camtasia is it the live stream but i just kind of scrub along here it's pretty choppy and if i was to play it back it's it would be oh it's okay and i've got a pretty good machine now i want to take this clip down here on the end and we're going to come over here i'm going to zoom in a little bit on that track i've already applied proxy video the proxy effect to this this video clip and this is just a stock asset but look at that how smooth just i can just clip along there it's a little choppy in my playback uh on the the stream it looks like but some of that's probably just streaming but it's way better than way over here right like where i just moved my playhead and it took a second to kind of load everything up so what i'm going to do in the meantime i am actually going to i want to show you how to apply proxy we'll talk about that and i'm going to let that work because it takes a few seconds in the background to make sure that the it's kind of doing like a almost like a render effect um and then we'll talk about some other things in the meantime so then we can come back and see how it does to actually do proxy go to your media bin so you've got i've got all these videos up here holy cow you can see i actually applied proxy to one i'm gonna take this first one just right click on it and there's a little category called proxy video it says create proxy video and now i'm just gonna do that to a bunch of these and let camtasia go to work on them in the background and one you'll see they'll have uh i got the proxy video you can tell by the orange dot there let's see proxy video and we're going to see how much this changes that impact overall that one might still be rendering so some of these might take a while because they're kind of big um which you know we'll just we'll do those for now and see what happens so while we're waiting for that proxy video videos to get ready what we're going to do is i want to talk about the number two thing is transitions so let me just go to our transitions tab here and you can see i don't know if i can you can see it's probably a little hard to read on screen but you can see we've got lots of transitions there we've added i think it was like 75 transitions now scroll down here a little bit you can see so i'm just going to keep scrolling here this is a lot of transitions now real quick before we get into all of them because i'm not going to read 75 transitions to you i have feelings about transitions i am almost against transitions i don't think we should use so many transitions i think it's it's like oh gosh because what happens is people go and use all 75 to 85 of them right like then you're like what have you done to my video or what have you done to this video why did you use all of them i think rule of thumb transitions need to have a purpose they should be conveying something um however the thing that i love about all the things that camtasia has added is i've been able to do some really cool things like in small bits not just from like image like video to video but with text and bringing text in or bringing some other elements in these transitions really open up some opportunities so i want to show you a few and then we'll look at applying them uh because there's a ton here and now here's the other thing we'll talk about is favorites because we have so many different transitions it's a pain in the neck to go through and find the ones that you really like especially you're like man that one i'm gonna use that transmission one a lot well that's what favorite will come in handy so let's go ahead and start looking at here transition so i put together this little spot of uh just you're gonna we're just watched a couple clips of transitions and you can see what it looks for like the made for kids content where they're not really reading the text or the titles as much but when we did live streaming way back way back when these drop downs and they will put more isn't like you know a traditionally told point they speak right to what what we um and when the square moves off the next frame now we're at a whole new video the four step process you always look at progress before can't get you up to speed we'll take camtasia for for instance right so you can see there's a variety of different ones if i just scrub through those you can see this one's like a zoom in effect you've got on this one you've got this kind of arrow that's come across and you can see here this one's got a it's kind of like it's just sliding out of the way with a little bit of a bounce so tons of different options here in these transitions this one's like a blur zoom out kind of zoom in thing and this one was oh the ripples which it's not i'm not a fan of the ripples so much but i want to show them off this one's i love this one it's like squiggly lines as a transmission effect and you go into your next clip and then you've got this kind of waves and then you've got here this one was a like a ripple effect like almost a wave so tons of different options here as you're looking at these transitions um and you can see the way these are these are just typical trend transitions like you'd apply any kind of transition but there are a ton of them and a couple things to think about as you're doing this is kind of the impact it's going to have so let me just go back over to this video here i'm just going to add let's say i want to bring in some text and i'm just going to uh add some text here maybe there we go and i'm just going to make that a lot bigger and let's make it just make it ariel black just so we can we can see it a little bit better in fact i might even go even larger here let's go 500. okay so now it's gonna be it's really noticeable right i got this text here i could do lots of different things with it and i just want this text to transition and trans you know maybe in and out some of these transitions just to be aware it's my computer is saying like you're doing a lot of things here that's pretty cool because it only affected the text right so i love that's actually a really cool kind of behavior effect um that's i love that one we can change it here let's get this blur slide because sometimes what you'll get is it will affect kind of everything that's on the screen at that point oh that did not change uh come on just gotta make sure it's applying my computer's rendering all those doing all that proxy video and background okay so that one's pretty cool so what you'll have to do is you have to play with it and see what kind of impact it's going to have now one that i mentioned that i liked is transition or transmission another one this is really fun it's called glitch it's one of my other favorite new ones and it looks like it's kind of got that you know a glitch effect happening let me just scroll back to so you can see it a little bit boom it looks so it's kind of it's kind of a cool effect it's not something you probably want to use all the time again but for certain instances and certain meanings that could be really effective um and you can have it come in on just parts of of your clips and not affect the whole thing however i'm pretty sure it was like let's say hexagon and that one is just working on the text so but if you have two two clips sometimes it can get a little bit messy so just gotta be careful now let's say i really want to always i i want that glitch uh the first glitch always available here there's a little star icon and i hope you can see it up there it's a little hard to see on the screen maybe i can zoom in a little bit here and come over here let's see is it going to move over i don't think it's going to move over for you guys okay we'll zoom out back out because it's better you see it a little bit then not at all but there's just that star icon if i hit that star icon it gets added to my favorite so then that way it's readily available and you can really just customize the things that you're always using so transitions are amazing i don't want to downplay transmit uh transitions in any way i just think remember as you're making videos and you're thinking about videos what you want to be thinking about is how am i going to use this what's it telling my users or my viewers and does it make sense because we've all seen the powerpoint presentations that use too many transitions we've seen videos that say too many transitions i'm a fan of just cutting just chop you know having jump cuts things like that that's going to be very effective however when you are looking for a little bit of spice a little bit added to your video to make it um be a little bit more effective i do think that it can be very powerful to add a transition now the other thing i'll say and let's just go back to my my screen here for a second let's say you like that but you wish it could go the other way don't forget in camtasia 2020 was added reverse transition so then you can actually go the other way you can reverse the effect basically so play the transition goes in the opposite opposite way so just another quick little tip there so uh i'm gonna just looks like some of our proxy video is still in progress it's uh it's making some work there so we're gonna we're gonna keep coming back to that here in a second um as it's doing that one of the things that happens oftentimes when we're making videos is there are lots of audio issues right you're dealing with audio you're trying to balance it out especially if you're making something training videos you got to be careful about using music at all you don't want to distract your learning from half the learning from happening however there's times when you want to use music and i think i've i've shared this on the show if not i'll share if i have i'm sorry if i haven't it's irrelevant to this i was doing a presentation it was pre-recorded i it was about 20 minutes long because it was uh for a conference and i added a music track bed and i thought this is gonna be awesome it's gonna keep things moving and i brought it way down and i said this is awesome it sounds really good in my headphones and then i send it off to people and they start watching they're like this is not even watchable i can't even hear what you're saying it was frustrating it was i was upset with myself for making that mistake because i know better getting that balance between the voice and the music is so challenging because you're adding all these dots and you're bringing the audio down it's called audio ducking it's frustrating at best and then sometimes you still mess it up well here's the thing that camtasia 2021 is going to offer us and i want to show this this is going to get crazy because i got a lot of audio tracks here and i apologize it's going to sound like noise but i did this on purpose because i want to show the power of this so let me go ahead and share my screen again okay so we got all these tracks i'm gonna play this for just a quick second i've got nine video tracks and a music track this is gonna sound awful okay you can't make heads of tale of any of that sound but here's what we're going to do we're going to go to our audio effects there's a new audio effect called emphasize and with emphasize it's going to allow us to choose which audio we want to emphasize and bring everything else down we're not going to get rid of all the other audio which we could do that too and in this scenario who would ever do this who would ever put nine video tracks on the same kind of same it just doesn't make sense but i wanna i want to show this emphasize because this was really cool so i come here i'm going to add it to track six okay let me zoom out a little bit here further so you can still see the edges there we go tracks so it's on track six you can see if i pull up the little tab there there it is and now i've got this option up here emphasize and i can turn how much do i want to emphasize i'm gonna i know because i practice with this i'm gonna turn up to about ah let's say 94. that's fine now listen to this playback in comparison to what we heard before the visual lounge is something that is a broad topic about customer education and the reason we okay so we still got some noise in the background there's still a little bit of the din of all the conversations but the one track clearly talk about customer education one it's something i think at techsmith we're really passionate about but two so now i also have a music track in there i'm going to add emphasize to that now i've got emphasize on that and i want that to be about say 70 and we're going to take that track six and we're going to add a little bit more emphasis we're going to turn this up to 97. and and the variable amount depends on what you're dealing with right like normally i'm going something very extreme here for the example but now let's go back here and let's listen to those tracks hey everybody welcome to the visual lounge wherever you're at whether you're listening live or to the podcast we're grateful that you're here with us today and i'm thinking that audio might still be a little bit too much and so i might want to de-emphasize that even a little bit more and here it sounds one of the things that we like to talk about here on the visual lounge is something that is a broad topic about customer education the reason we talk about customer so out of all those tracks i you know and if i'm still finding issues i can bring down the audio a little bit more of all those tracks though it was able to quickly and easily get the audio that i wanted to rise above to the top to me this is amazing and a huge time saver and you can add it across multiple clips or if you have like two speakers you want to emphasize here and emphasize on the on the next clip to the next speaker you could easily do that if you've got a music bed it's going to actually look for those gaps in the audio so if you got like speaker a little bit of gap because you're doing demo and then speaker again it's going to be like yep let's bring the audio up here because there's no one speaking it's it's super super cool this is this is one of the things i absolutely love it is amazing i've been using it a ton just to emphasize the things that are it's like wow let's put the let's get that music and those soundtracks in really proper order here um and so emphasize is one of one of the things i think is going to save everyone a lot of time now i want everyone to remember with the proxy video these are like hour-long video clips it's going to take a little bit of work to get it done i'm probably a little bit overly ambitious here for our show but i think it's well worth worth seeing so let me check questions here uh krista says i was hoping for an easy circle picture and picture to pair with my screen capture is this in 2021 did i miss it in 2020 i'm still in 2019 not in 2020 uh we're going to show some stuff about picture-in-picture to make that that a more rounded view um we're going to talk about what's called corner rounding you'll see that and uh when jason gets here he's going to cover some of that so stay tuned because we've got some really great options there lots of ways you could do that but uh we'll make it it makes it pretty easy now i'm gonna go back to my screen here real quick we're gonna go to our media bin and you can see we've got some still that's got a little bit of processing here got the orange dots means uh proxy here it just even as we just scroll back see it's it's struggling a little bit now you can see well let's see this let's go to a different project here real quick so one thing i should say about proxy video here is that it once you've created a proxy video uh it's basically storing it in the background uh you know so you can you could delete it but um this one i've got that same video clip i showed earlier with the proxy video so it's it's pulling from that as well but here's here's one i want to talk about it's called media mats so in previous versions 2020 to be specific we had this idea of you could do a track matte and you could do alpha and invert alpha and luminosity and luminosity invert you can still do all that stuff that's still there but there's one uh it's called a a visual effect that's called a media mat and that just you can do something like this really easily okay so we just gotta it's just uh i just did a graphic text coming in looking like we got over this video in the background let me show you real quick i'm going to recreate this i'm just going to drop this video on the timeline and so we got this video you know that's the background we want i'm just going to get to my annotations i'm going to add some text here and basically i'm just going to again take this text and make it to something a little bit bigger because when i think when you you know you want to do something like that it's uh you want it to be a little bit thicker a little bit heavier to actually mask out the things that you're doing here so let me just scale it up wrong one i'm not going to scale up my call out here a little bit there we go that's good so now if i want to mask this out i can go to my visual effects and i can come here to media matte was not named after me and i just click and drag that on and then it's going to show through those things below and then of course you've got some different you can change different modes so if you wanted to you know depending on what you're trying to do with that that effect and what your kind of graphic you're using you can even change the intensity a little bit uh so super super easy to do now the other thing that's here that uh is i think is is really awesome is we have this other effect called motion blur so right now nothing's happening with this this this mat it is just kind of static on the screen which was fine hey no complaints right but if i if i animate this one of the things like i can get this let me just drag it off to the side here get it out of the way and when i just add an effect so we're going to go to animations i'm just gonna do a custom animation on it and i'm gonna drag this so it's a little bit longer there we go and i'm gonna add that custom effect here and just zoom in on my timeline a little bit so we can see it make this a little bit longer when i and then i'm basically at the end of this what i want it to do is end up say right here and when that plays back it's fine but it's it it doesn't feel like it's it's kind of a weird motion one of the new effects is uh visual effects is called motion blur i'm just going to click and drag it to my timeline so now as it moves you can see that blurriness and it's adding the blurriness to give it the effect and that feeling of movement which i think is really cool because it it feels more natural it feels kind of like this like it's really moving like just like if i'm if i'm on camera and i'm moving like this you know there's some blur there right there you get the effect well that's what it's doing on the screen with these effects as well um the other thing just to point out here is if you you right click and you get these animation easing types um there are some different ones and they've been there you just maybe didn't know about it but like watch the the spring one here as it goes through with that with that new motion blur yeah kind of you can see it whipping past just going to play it back in slow like even on the it gets when it gets a little bit of recoil so some of my somewhat just just a super super favorite thing and i love i love the interplay here of motion and graphics and and now that we got proxy video it's going to be easier to see the changes that you're making as you're going along um so so we've got jason he is in the waiting room he's going to come in in just a second but i've got one more thing i want to talk about first because it's something i'm also super really excited about i mean how do you not be excited about all these things actually with our proxy video still going in the background but we're going to try this so i'm going to move to a screen here in just a second but the the last thing i want to talk about it has a funny name it's called a lut l-u-t or lookup table is what it stands for and you might be hear it referred to as a 3d lut um and these are basically it's a series of instructions for color that says to the video like color this way color that way and uh there are a ton of available you can go and get for free out on the internet you have to obviously you know make sure you're not download loading something from somebody you don't trust um but we're gonna look at these because i love that in an instant you can change the look and feel of your video on the coloration of it to to for lots of different reasons professional color graders or people who do coloration on videos use these types of things to also get a consistent feel across all your videos so we're gonna go here we've got this video here this is untouched uh just previous episode video like we're watching today and if we go to our visual effects we've got this color lut and i'm just going to click and drag it down to this clip here hopefully let me make sure it's selected i'm just going to click it to the timeline you can see now there is a color lut now when i go there i go to my properties you'll see that you've got this color i can turn on or off now instantly there's probably if you do this in camtasia right now you're only going to find enhanced contrast but you can you can go through and you can just play with the intensity to see what impact it has on the way your video looks uh and you can download as i have done from a variety of different places all these different views of what of these luts there's ton of them so let's do this milo 5. you can see it looks like it's a little bit more washed out i can adjust the coloration we can do this neon one it's you know bring up the colorations a little bit more red you got this sprocket i mean and the thing is you'll have to try out see kind of the look and feel of what you're going for some of these i don't love i would probably never use but i i put them in here because of i wanted the examples let's try chemical 168 so this one's got kind of that chemical looking look and feel maybe you know like a horror a little bit edge of a horror movie or action can see a bourbon 64 is a little red oh this one's looks like a little bit sepia ish um and so it just depends on what lut you're using it's going to change the look and feel but the cool thing is it's really easy then to apply that look and feel to any of your videos so for instance if i just take one of these we can see which one it's going to apply to you know we can see i don't it must be the one with the the graphic on it so but again you can get that consistent look and feel across those so i really like luts it gets us a long way a lot closer to having color correction it's not a color correction it's not meant to be color correction but it definitely can add some variety and again with purpose that spice to your next video so so we've covered a couple things already proxy video it's still work a work in progress because it's still uh turning the you know turning those videos into the proxy videos because they're all so big we've talked about the transitions we've talked about our audio enhancements uh i covered media maths and then we talked in a little bit of motion blur i know jason might cover those again i uh got excited and covered them anyway uh and then the 3d luts and i again 3d luts are super awesome but you do need there's the contrast one but you might need to go download some other ones so with that said let's introduce an assign getting get him in here jason welcome to the visual lounge oh hey matt thanks so much for having me uh sounds like you're having a grand old time going through uh feature sets inside of 2021. i you know what i i i mentioned this on linkedin this morning uh that i i really feel like this is probably the best release of camtasia uh i've i've seen and i think part of it is just it feels really like these are nice enhancements um that have like expanded what we i feel like i can do in camtasia like i'm a pretty i'm gonna be honest i'm a pretty basic video creator i don't go out and do a bunch of really super crazy stuff i do a lot of like presentations i do some share out videos you know and i put a little bit of spice into but this is like opened up like oh man look what i can do uh i just feel like it enhances everything i've done and it feels like the performance has been really really good like even like i don't i think you probably could see what i was working on but i've got nine videos on my screen once i get those all proxied i know it's going to be like easy peasy to go through and make those changes and edit so just it's been it's been really rock solid for me so uh our our developers are i mean they're the they're the awesome ones we just we're the lucky ones we just get to talk about it we each get to play right right so i was going to mention you were talking about proxy video really quick one of the things i think is actually really valuable about that is uh you've mentioned here on the visual lounge and in the past that usually the best camera someone has available to them is usually sitting in their pocket it's some sort of smartphone and those cameras shoot such high quality video that when you bring them into camtasia they're big they're big chunky boys and that's actually how i've utilized proxy video as of late which was just converting uh footage of my children's uh outdoor activities or sporting activities just to be able to edit that but uh there are a couple things i wanted to share today and it sounds like you might have hit on a few so i want to make sure i don't double dip unless people have questions we're happy to double dip you might have something that's so we'll just go through your list jason um if you haven't yet go do you want to i'm assuming you want to share your screen yep i'm going to pull that up right now so that i am sharing my uh camtasia editor interface uh one of the things i think i want to talk about first does come from a a creator site a content creator side with camtasia for those of us who work in a two monitor setup we've always had the privilege of being able to start a recording and just casually move the recorder over to another screen a lot of us however when we worked started working remote we had just our laptops available to us whatever the singular screen was that's available with the introduction of the release of camtasia 2021 the window the recorder window which has been completely redesigned by matt matt if you hadn't talked about that i'll actually pull that up here right now i hadn't yet so this is good okay beautiful so this right here is the brand new i like to call it really cleaned up really modernized version of the recorder window be aware that it is constantly being iterated on by our team they're they're making changes under the hood they're releasing things and maintenance updates so if you're currently using camtasia 2021 keep it updated as often as you can because you're going to see changes to this but it's still the same thing you know asking those three questions what do you want people to be able to see with your screen choices here uh do you want them to see you so if i were to i don't know turn on my other webcam i've got the the second one turned on here so there's my second webcam hi everybody jason i can show you five webcams in my webcam that's i gotta be on camera i have my microphone choices here and then i also have the system audio the difference is with camtasia 2021 is we introduced something called window masking and it sounds like a fancy term but if you've been in a zoom call with anyone and you're not the host you usually do not see those zoom controls on your screen right so if you and i matter in a call on a meeting using something like zoom i'm not going to see any of your controls if you're the host well the same thing happens with the camtasia recorder as a matter of fact i'm going to run a command because i forgot to turn that on so we'll do that real quick that allows you to see something that's kind of fun so if we bring up camtasia and i bring up that recorder just like before when i hit the record button matt you're going to see a 3 2 1 countdown and then you shouldn't see anything else on your screen we're waiting for it oh where to go so i'm just doing my recording but as a matter of fact the my mouse that's moving around on the screen is moving around a recorder interface that has been hidden or masked from view that means i can use the recording uh use the tool while i'm recording and it won't show up in my final video so let me show you what i am seeing so that everyone gets a sense of what exactly i'm talking about well jason as you're doing that i i love this because i know for me in camtasia i know there are hot keys that i can just kind of control start and stop but i i don't know how long i've been on a mac and i still don't remember the hotkey for to start pause and stop my recording so i like oh i guess i got to go up to the thing but having the controller right there might you know just for sound adjustments for all maybe i want to switch on things i so i love that it's hidden in the recording so even if it's there on my screen i can still utilize it but then it's going to get out of my way so i think that's that's just awesome and that's a that's a windows only feature right now correct mac masks on both sides yeah so when i hit record this time i actually turned off the masking with a special code i have and this is what i'm seeing while you're there now i don't have my webcam turned on but there is something really valuable for me as a as a creator and that's my volume meter i can make sure that while i'm speaking to you and doing my screen recording and talking through the awesomeness that i'm sharing with you that my microphone is in fact picking up my voice and that it's staying in the right levels because i don't want to move too far back or too close but because it's masked by default you won't see any of this in my final recording and i just find that to be a very powerful powerful tool when you have your webcam turned on you will also see the webcam preview uh i'm animated when i do my videos i kind of move around and i definitely have pulled myself out of frame a few times but having that there as a visual reminder that i'm still in frame that my background still looks good it's just a really helpful tool in terms of creation yeah i'm super thrilled by that yeah if you're listening to the podcast afterwards of course feel free to email us at the visual lounge at techsmith.com so okay jason we got the recorder what's next on your list of things that you think we should all know about because we've shared a few but what else so the next thing i definitely want to talk about is a combination of what you showed everyone here and talked about which was that motion blur motion blur definitely adds a a less robotic attachment to your videos right you can actually see the motion of something happening what i like to do is combine it with a couple of effects here inside of camtasia 2021 which is uh motion blurring and then moving my webcam out of the way but one of the biggest things that people have asked us for is some sort of ability to not only um you know adjust the webcam which we have uh easily done for years right we've always been able to do that little post-it stamp thing in the corner you know i could go into my visual effects and add that same motion blur that you added as well but we added a couple of new things that helps one is found right here in the visual effects section and that is something simple called corner rounding i can apply this effect just the same way i apply any other effect by clicking and dragging it onto my media and then it shows up over in my properties panel with the different parameters and effects that i can change so corner rounding i simply choose the corners that i want to affect maybe i want the upper left and lower right and then i adjust the radius on them by clicking and dragging them out so i'm kind of doing i forget what that's called i don't know it's kind of like a double tier shape or teardrop shape but for people like me that really want that you know that punch out look i can actually change those different radiuses based on uh how the camera you know was set up originally like right now it's set in that 16x9 uh format so if i wanted to get it maybe more circular which is like numero uno i could use that media map effect that you talked about a little bit earlier but i actually have another trick way to do it and it combines another tool that we added inside of camtasia 2021 which is these non-descript little slider buttons here these are toggleable effects so i can apply lots of different effects to my media and then turn them off and on just to kind of see how things look and how things change so what i'm going to do to give it more of a circular look is i'm actually just going to turn on the cropping tool inside of camtasia and i'm going to crop my video down just a little bit to take out some of those sharp edges on the outside and then reapply my corner rounding and now i can actually make it much more of a circular effect the same way that you would do with some sort of punch out to other media mat so now when i play this video back you'll see that it drops down into the corner and turns itself into a little a hole punch for my for my pit for my picture and picture well yeah yeah actually i had a question for that jason so that's perfect answer and i love you know i think the interesting thing is it it took like because i was watching i was like well how's he gonna do this because i'm not i've not seen you do this and i was like how's he gonna do it but just understanding that when you have something that's wide you know 16 by nine it doesn't get it's not going to make a good circle but the fact that you cropped it to be more square allows it to make a more perfect circle so i think that's a great tip and uh with the cropping feature inside of camtasia would you point that out again on the screen real quick where that's at yeah because i think cropping tools yeah it's right up here above the canvas we actually have three tools we have our our standard pointer tool we have a hand tool that allows you to move your content around if you want to like refocus your canvas and then you have the cropping tool that's up here on the right that allows you to crop whatever particular piece of media that you have selected and if you happen to not know if it's selected or not when you uh have crop mode turned on in a media selected the actual border of it turns blue when it's not selected it's clear or yellow depending on what's on your canvas so just a little tip there crop mode is right up here at the top of your screen you can also if you're a windows user hold down the alt key and you can crop on the fly without having to go up and switch to it uh any given time yeah and and crop has been there for a long time so that is a that is that's a great tip that's one of those things like you don't know what to do with it necessarily and then once you do you're like oh my gosh there's so many cool things i can do when i cr start to crop my videos and i've seen some really cool green screens with actually i've done this before where i've cropped my video so i'm on one side of video and then i'm also on the other side of video having a conversation with myself so there's some some cool stuff you can do just by cropping cropping some of those videos absolutely absolutely love it love it jason i love the rounded corners um and toggle effects so i think that's really cool because now allison i think before it was really it was kind of painful to like add add add take take you know i think now you just like oh that doesn't look right let's just turn it off yeah absolutely and what's great is i could render out a couple different versions of the same video just by toggling things on and off to get feedback you know from creating a piece of content for one of our customers or for someone on my team they're like this looks great except i really don't like the glow effect i'm like no problem i just turn off the glow effect render the video back out and it's ready to go with very little effort on my part which i'm all about speed and efficiency yeah well jason this is this is fantastic stuff any other other things that we should be aware of in camtasia 2021 that we haven't talked about so far well let's see you covered um emphasize audio right which i did probably my favorite new feature only because it all of a sudden opens up possibilities based on the audio uh music files that we do include in the library inside of camtasia 2021 now you can utilize those and have that great backing track did you discuss the new grouping capability inside of camtasia we have not talked about the new grouping capabilities so let's let's dig into that because i know i thought i saw in the comments kind of in passing someone was talking about grouping it might not have been a real positive experience but let's talk about from your experience jason from grouping so just kind of a base level for everyone who doesn't know grouping allows you to take multiple tracks and basically kind of group it together which then you can edit it in at least from a mac user's perspective in a whole other kind of little package but makes things cleans up a timeline actually had a really great conversation with someone recently and uh you know talked about group why grouping might be uh advantageous for their project because it's like they had 20 tracks and like so i think there's lots of helpful things about grouping so okay so you got a few things on timeline yep so i threw a couple of call-outs up here on the timeline to give a good representation of what this is going to do um our mac users have always enjoyed what you're talking about both platforms let me rephrase have been able to group for quite a while what we've done on the window side is changed the approach and made the grouping even more powerful so grouping is exactly that i can select all of these callouts that i want to have in a group and why would i want them in a group well maybe i want to move them all in the same place i want to reposition them i want to add them to the library so they can be reused in other projects but when we group things now there's a couple things that happen one i'm just going to right click on it and choose to group it i get my grouped media but as soon as i do that you'll notice something has happened over here in my properties panel and that is camtasia has applied auto quick properties to that group meaning i can go in here and make changes to the text for one of those callouts and have it affect it right within that group without having to open the group up and drill down and make changes i can apply a theme to that entire group at once so maybe i want my camtasia colors on all of them at the same time it's really really helpful i can do things if i'm creating content or groups for other people by using the quick property editor which is found in the upper right hand corner this little kind of pen glyph here on the right the quick property editor this is this is the deep cuts matt this is where we're getting to the point where i can actually take pieces within that group and link them together okay so i can move things around and have them all positioned and link them together inside of the editor itself and when i save this back out now when i make changes it affects all the content that i have linked together so these last two callouts on the fly were linked together maybe i don't want those green green maybe i want them to be blue maybe we want these to be white you can change those all around you can change what the actual naming of them are if you don't want to say text if you want to say steps if you're teaching someone a stepping uh situation or if you want it to be instead of call out you say speech bubbles whatever you want to do in terms of creating those quick properties that allow someone to take the content that you've created with a little bit of guidance from you or whoever is asking the content to be created and then now you can create videos with consistency based on those quick property edits the other part of grouping which is actually the the big change on the windows side is when you go to open a group in fact down here on my timeline if i wanted to open this group up and make some edits when i double click that now it opens like our mac counterparts in its own tab meaning i can make changes within this group without having to worry about affecting other parts of my timeline usually i group things when i'm getting to the point where things are timed just right or positioned just right and i'll admit i've been using camtasia a long time and i might accidentally bump something a frame or two and then it's out of sync from where i want it the groups allow me to drill right in within those group tabs make changes in the tab itself knowing that it's only affecting what's happening in that group and then when i close that group out it has been changed based on my needs and it's ready to be uh used right there in the project oh that that is awesome though that's some you know in fact i don't don't know that i'd seen all that linking of the groups and you know it's it's but definitely for people working in their organizations and their groups it's such a that's such a powerful concept that i could i could do all this upfront work and then have someone else go through and and whether make changes or use it as a template kind of as part of the my whatever template i'm creating for them jason we do we are starting to get a few questions i want to make sure we're asking this first one we we might need a little bit of context um so jesse if you have more context for it that's helpful uh w hatcher on linkedin said and asked said that was neat so i don't know this was a little bit ago so i don't know what exactly it was that was neat but sure what about adjusting the size of a video from a cell phone how can you make it larger so it's a normal video size the video is vertical and i'm going to start here and then you can think tell me what you think jason is that sure if you're working with a vertical video and i'm trying to find my phone here so i'm working with a vertical video that's never going to match that the 19 or 16 by nine landscape view right it's never going to match and so what you have to decide to do is is do you want it to to scale it up really big and try to fill as much of that as you can but then it's going to crop or do you want to put that in there like at its full size and then do something in the background because you could do lots of cool things in the background like you could actually just take that same video scale it really big so it does fill the whole background and make a put a blur over it and then put the the video that people are going to watch on top of it that's what i would probably do um and i i think the context is media mats jason but is there something that that you would recommend for someone doing vertical video on their in inside of camtasia what they should do sure so i actually do the exact same thing you're talking about matt but i have to think if i'm creating a content that involves vertical video i'm i'm assuming that we're putting it on some sort of social media that that that accepts vertical video that where that's the norm if that's the case it's a good thing to note that if you open up a brand new project inside of camtasia and the first piece of media that you put on the timeline or on the canvas is that vertical video camtasia actually will resize its canvas to match that media right away so you won't worry about black bars or any sort of missing area of your screen of the canvas being empty it will fill the entirety of that size canvas of that vertical video as long as it's the first piece of media on the timeline if it's not the first piece of media it is good to note that at the top of the editor up here in the drop down menu there is an option here called project settings and underneath those project settings is where you have control over your canvas dimensions everything from your standard 16x9 widescreen format that matt and i have been talking about we even have sizing for instagram or facebook cover videos we've thought a lot about how these things work if you have a piece of media on there that didn't auto adjust or you change the settings later on you can always choose fit to visible and it will find that content and wrap the canvas around it so that it fits without any black bar beware that's going to take a little bit of practice but we try and take a little bit of the challenging part out of it right away at the beginning okay jason we're going to go to our next question because this one was a good one is uh uh christa asked what are markers why do they keep appearing what do i use them for she's in 2019 um sure so i i you know markers are one of the things it's an it's i i have felt her pain they keep appearing and because i think later on she said how do i turn them off and she did get her answer from someone in chat but we can cover it here too so markers what are they so markers are just that they're marker indicators that you could put on your timeline or on pieces of media that have multiple purposes you can title them which then turns them into a table of contents that you can export with camtasia later on people sometimes use markers within their editing just as a quick reminder if i'm making it edit today and i leave the video at lunchtime and come back tomorrow morning i'm like oh left off here or wherever it is uh as soon as you said she's accidentally turning how do i keep turning these things on uh it happens to me too markers are turned on over here in the left-hand side of your timeline there's a little drop down menu that says quiz and it says markers and if you've toggled that on by mistake that is how the markers show up and then you drag your mouse along the timeline and you'll see this little blue plus that i can indicate markers anywhere i want on my timeline or as we mentioned you can actually put markers right on your media and they can be named right over here in the properties panel but the biggest purpose of markers in my estimation is if you're going to be creating a table of contents so that people can easily search through say a longer piece of media or want them you want people to be able to drilled right down to certain parts of information that's what they are used for side note if you record your powerpoint presentation with camtasia using the plugin whenever you switch slides we will automatically add a marker to your timeline so that you can also create an easy table of contents for people to be able to jump through your content as needed but if it's turned on by mistake you can just turn uh click this little error carrot button and turn it off and of course there is a keyboard shortcuts control m to turn on and off those markers as well and i'll just add one one thing i've used markers for that is a little a little bit more obscure usage is to create when i'm creating something that's interactive now there's lots of limitations on interactive video where because where you publish it really matters can't just publish it to youtube or your lms you need to do some stuff but i i put markers in when i want to have jump points um maybe you could do a very lightweight i don't really recommend this but lightweight like scenario branching video it just gets super complicated super quick but uh markers make a world of difference in doing that because then you just you can link to marker and have a jump point based on a button or whatever kind of clickable spot you put in there so um yep that's very true well jason we are we're getting close to time here and these have all been uh super awesome uh questions and i know there's another question that about a rounded corners uh just basically what it was called that's where you make the circle right that's the feature again and and that was an interactive visual effect right yep corner rounding underneath the visual effects tool well jason uh first of all thank you so much for for joining me today and coming in because i i love that you've got the windows perspective and you know i'm a pretty heavy mac user nowadays and so uh but i think overall we've covered a ton i mean this release is just really really fantastic and i'm again just hopefully everyone's out there you get a chance even if you haven't you're still working on an older version you can do the trial for the the 30 days give it a go you'll get the watermark if you haven't purchased but you know you get to see some of these effects and actions make sure see that they're going to work for you if you have maintenance which uh if you do if you don't you probably should get maintenance but you're gonna you would have gotten this version for free if you get maintenance on whatever version you get next if you buy this one you add maintenance on because you're not only gonna get priority support you're gonna get the the the next version of camtasia for free and jason then they're gonna get the certification access to our certification program which as you know because i've worked on for a long time now you've worked on it and it's it is a ton of content for and i don't know if you go through that how you don't end up feeling confident in your usage of camtasia it's usually you'll go through it and you'll discover even if you're a long-time camtasia user you're going to pick up several little tips and tricks along the way you're like oh if i had only known that back then and your workflow changes your content changes and you're right you feel proud because you've now leveled yourself up quite quite easily yeah for sure well jason uh let's do a little thing uh we're trying here and this is a little bit more off the cuff because you know you came in late and we're not you know you're just helping me out mostly uh but we're gonna do a speed round questions so okay okay are you ready ah i am ready get ready quick quick short answer that's all we're looking for from you camtasia 20 to camtasia 21 favorite feature favorite feature emphasizing favorite new feature emphasize audio perfect um the the craziest effect series of effects that you've ever applied to a particular video oh probably stacking three behaviors at once and combining it with one of these new wipes in 2021 it was intense nice uh would you prefer to listen to country music or alternative indie rock alternative indie rock a hundred percent of the time not a country fan perfect uh favorite non uh favorite techsmith product that's not camtasia audi i'm a big fan of audio audio is a big part of my life definitely audiate and for those that don't know audiate is a program uh actually someday we'll we'll see i see it in the menu uh we'll get some more integrations with camtasia but uh basically you can drop your audio in there and it will transcribe it and give you an srt file which can be used for captioning you can go through and automatically remove um's and odds from the audio which is um it's amazing um and i'm looking forward to even further connections of that when we get to that point so it's gonna be good so if you haven't checked out audi we got a free trial of that no credit card required go go check it out well jason thanks again for joining me thanks for your your awesome insight jason i i know you guys are doing webinars all the time how would someone go about they want to really dig into camtasia to learn more where could they find out more information about those sure so if you're inside of camtasia itself if you go to the help menu you can choose video tutorials right at the top of the screen and that will take you to our tutorial page which we're constantly iterating on and making sure that it's up to date and new you can also go up to the support menu and choose webinars and this is also where i spend a great deal of my time updating and creating webinars for for gaining knowledge like next week we have four in one day of all what's new in camtasia we conducted one yesterday on uh using camtasia and editing audio with audio like we were just kind of talking about uh and we're going to be updating all these choices on a regular basis down here we have snagit ones and we have thought leadership ones as well that come from from you matt and your side of the house with a lot of the thought leadership and things of um things outside of the products per se but more about content creation marketing seo value of visuals and all the things that we help you with here at techsmith perfect well i'm just i'm looking through the i'm catching up on some of the chat stuff and i love that people are loving proxy video i love that you guys are uh one call out for stand-alone projects on windows which we didn't talk about even oh my gosh we didn't even talk about that's probably my favorite shoot it's so normal for me now because organization i need help yes yes well jason thanks again once again for joining me we're always happy to have you here on the visual lounge with that said i want to thank everybody who has tuned in today ask questions if you're listening to podcasts thank you so much for that as well if you've got comment feedback things you want to tell us let us know email the visual lounge at techsmith.com we're happy to take your questions happy to to hear your commentary and if you're on youtube you're on facebook you're on whatever platform you're listening to podcasts if it gives you a chance to rate us or give a thumbs up a like whatever it might be please do so we'd love to hear from you guys that helps us to know that we're doing the right types of content so hopefully you're getting a lot out of every episode we'll be back next week we got an awesome guest valerie pennington she's also known as the penguin prof she is doing awesome stuff on youtube she's in higher education teaching her faculty how to create online learning we're gonna be talking to her about creating videos and things like that so don't forget to tune in next week same time same channel and whatever you're doing whether you're making videos images creating better audio we hope that you take a little time to level up every single day we'll see you next week

Channel: TechSmith

Views: 2,102

Keywords: TechSmith, Screencast, Video, how do I, how to, capturing, demo video, recording my screen, training, documentation, explain a process, show someone how to, camtasia, camtasia 2021, camtasia new features, camtasia features

Id: p_aUwWYr8ZY

Length: 57min 44sec (3464 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021