Hello, this is Cristi. Welcome to a new video. In this one, I'm going to show you a how to
create a special highlight that looks like a marching ants, like one of those lines and
dashed lines that go around an object and highlight it, especially. There is no effect like this in Camtasia. This was from a question that I saw in the
Camtasia Users group, and I thought it was a very interesting discussion there about
this and how to achieve this, like a marquee selection, the kind you see in Photoshop or
any photo editing software, you've got those lines just marching around the outline. So I thought about it and I come up with a
nice solution, I think is very elegant and it gives you a lot of flexibility and you
can create assets that you can reuse. So let's have a look at how to do this. So let's suppose that I go to Annotations,
by the way, I'm using Camtasia 2021 for this, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't
do it into 2020, and I'll explain why. There is a text here. I'm just gonna put this text on the, on the
canvas. And I would like this text. I want it to draw attention to to this text
and I'm going to show you know, a nice border around it, that's going to be sort of moving
around, like I told you. So we need to draw a sheep and then we will
use an effect that is in Camtasia 2021 called Media Matte. If you have Camtasia 2020, it's called Track
Matte, and it's a little bit different, but it achieves the same exact effect with the
mask. So let me show you how. I'm going to go to Annotations on the left
there, and I'm just going to select. You can select all, but we really just need
this rectangle, it doesn't matter which one it is. Just drag that to your canvas and make it,
you know, kind of large like this, and I don't know, you can change the color if you like. It's really not important because this is
not going to be visible. Before I do the rectangle, I also need to
create the marquee, that's going to be moving around the outline. So the way to do that is I'm going to hide
both of these, the texts and the rectangle. We'll bring them back later. And I'm going to show you a couple of ways
to do it. One of them is using triangles. So let's go with the triangle. I'm just going to use a triangle from these
shapes. If you don't see the triangle, make sure you
go to shapes and change style to All, and that's going to show all the shapes that are
available and thankfully, at least Camtasia, they have put in here at least the basic shapes. Let's call them basic shapes. And I'm going to just align this. You can use the snapping on the canvas to
help you align this properly. And look at this, I'm positioning this in
the very center of the canvas with the point of the triangle pointing in the center. You can also use the Control key to hold down
and just make it narrow like this. The idea is to have it kind of narrow, not
too narrow, but kind of narrow because those lines are very you know, short in the marquee
selection. So I'm going to just Control C and Control
V. I'm just basically duplicating this and going to the rotation here and around the
Z axis, 180 degrees. My copy is now facing downwards, and I'm going
to align this to the top so you can see my triangles are pointing in the same place. Control G to group them, Control C and V to
Paste, and then I'm going to do 90 degrees here, there you go. 90 degrees on these two. Now select all of them again, and Control
G again and Control C and V to duplicate. Basically, I'm making multiple copies of these
every time I copy them. And this time it's going to be a 45 degree
like this. And again, ungroup them. So as you can see now, I have several groups
on my timeline. Basically, what I want to do is un-group them
all, Control U and then Control G again to group them all into one single group. All this grouping is really not necessary,
except for the fact that it lets me duplicate these quickly and rotate them. So this one group I'm going to copy and paste
it, so I have a copy of it and I'm rotating it. And look at this, I'm creating these sort
of radial triangles all over the place. And I'm doing it again, so don't worry about
it, just, you know, you can do it as many times as you like to create this sort of pattern
that is, is radial like this. So I'm going to just stop here. You can actually, if your triangles are more
narrow, you can then do this more times, but I think this is quite enough for what I want
to achieve. So this was step one. Now I'm going to select both of these groups,
ungroup them all. And Camtasia is going to just create a lot
of shapes on the timeline. No problem, because as soon as you ungroup
them, they remain selected. And the only thing you need to do now is Control
G again, to group them again, just making sure they're all staying together in a single
group, because it's easier to move them around. So look at this, you know, I have this shape
now it's it looks like a umbrella kind of, seen from above, not a problem. Just leave this in the center of the canvas
for now and now let's bring in the shape that we actually wanted to create the marquee with. So I'm going to just unlock and show these
other two tracks. You can look on the left there, I've got the
tracks and I'm just going to right click and Remove all empty tracks just to keep things
clean in here. So these are, three tracks I'm concerned with. The group at the top is the actual triangles
shapes, so I can rename this group and call it Triangles, concentric, whatever you want
to call them. And I'm going to put this just below the shape
of the rectangle. I'm going to bring the text at the top. So this is my ensemble right now. I'm going to select the rectangle and again,
you know, make use of the snapping to just keep things centered, use the Control key
to just resize everything from the center. You can just align everything nicely, and
if you need, just adjust the text like this, so this is kind of the ensemble. It doesn't have to have text in the middle,
you can have anything you like, but I'm just using that text as an example. So here comes the cool part. This is how we will achieve the effect. I'm going to select my shape, my rectangle,
and basically what I want to do is my marquee selection or the marching ants effect, whatever
you want to call it, I wanted to move around the edges of this rectangle. I want it to go around the outlines sort of. So that means I want to see the outline first. So go to the Properties on the right and make
the outline thicker. Something like this, maybe. Depending on how delicate do you want this
to look, make it thinner or whatever, you can always change this later. Not a problem, so whatever decisions you make
here, are not destructive. They're not gonna, you know, you can always
go back and change them. So I'm going to just make this 20 pixels thick. The second thing is, I don't want to see the
inside of this rectangle, you know. Remember I just want to see the borders. So basically, go to the Fill and the opacity,
turn it all the way down. So now you can see through. That is how you turn the color off in the
shape. And now here comes the effect. The way we will do this, we will use this
effect in Camtasia 2021 called Media Matte to essentially create a mask from the object
on the top, which is our rectangle. And that's going to become a mask for the
object inside, which is below the object, which is our triangles. But before I do that, I want to actually make
the triangles move because of course, the marching ants is an effect that shows those
lines moving. So before we do that, I'm just going to go
to select the triangles and move your play head somewhere on the triangles on the timeline. It doesn't really matter where it is and just
add an animation to it. And not just any animation, we'll go to Animations
and go to Animations and drag a Custom Animation to my triangles. You can also achieve this by pressing Shift
and A in Camtasia, but I'm just going to put the animation here and just make the animation
quite long, maybe the whole length of the object. Now, of course this is 50 seconds long or
a minute long or 55 or whatever. I don't know if you want the animation to
last this long, so you can do it longer so you can use it as long as you like in your
projects. So you don't worry about the time running
out on this animation. Right. So I'm just going to make it 55 seconds long
or so. The animation we want is going to be a rotation,
right? Because they will move around the border and
rotate. So basically what I want to do is with this
selected and the selection in the timeline on the last key frame of this animation, go
to the clip properties on the right and just along the Z axis because that's the one that
rotates the object on the screen, let's put 720. Degrees rotation nothing's happened because
this is a perfect circle every time. But look, if I move, it's rotating like this,
now let's play this. Let's see if we are happy with the speed. One thing you may want to change is the speed. The easing of the animation by the Camtasia
will create an easing in and out on your animations. If you want to change that and have them move
at a constant speed. Not speed up and then slow down as the easing
does, right? Click on the animation click to enable easing
and then select linear. That's going to make a constant speed animation
all the way through. The other thing I don't like is they're kind
of spinning on-site clockwise. So if you want to change the direction of
the spinning, go to the last key frame again, make sure that red.is selected. Instead of seven 20, just a put a minus in
front of it, which is going to make it spin the other way. So now, It's going in the right direction
as I wanted to do. So this is not very fast. I kind of like it. It's about a minute long movement and it just
keeps going around in circles. So that is fine. Now let's create the effect very easy, click
on the shape and go to visual effects in Camtasia 2021. By the way, you don't have this in Camtasia
2020, but you can still do it. A different way. I'm now going to show you that too. So if you have 2021, just use this effect
media mat and apply this effect to the rectangle clip, which is now the track two on my timeline. So I'm just going to drag this on and there
you have it. Everything else disappeared. And I'm only seeing the part of the rotation
object that is inside of the surface covered by this shape, by the rectangle, in my case,
because I removed the background color of the shape. I'm only seeing the outline because that was
the only thing that was visible and that actually creates a mask with the thing below it. So basically that's what it does. So, and look at this, I've got my marching
band. Moving around, right? So this is one way to do this. Now there are some downsides to this, as you
can see around the corners, because the triangles are sort of radial around the corners. They look very L gated and they, you know,
may, you may not like them. You can see those slanted kind of edges. Of course, you can go on the shape and change. Outline thickness. Maybe I'm going to make it a thinner and you
can see the effect is preserved so I can keep playing this. And now the lines are thinner, right. And that may be, you know, you may be happy
with that or you can do it another way and I'm going to show you another way. But before that, let me show you what to do. If you have Camtasia 2020, unfortunately this
doesn't work in 2019 and previous versions because they don't have any on of these masking
effects. Right? So before Camtasia 2021 in Camtasia 2020,
this was introduced the track matte, which is the same like media map, but applying on
a whole track above the object. So let me show you how to achieve the same
exact thing in Camtasia 20. Click on the shape. I'm going to remove the effect the media matter
of fact for now, because I'm not going to use this. You don't have it in 2020. So now the same way you can achieve this in
2020, by selecting the track, you see track two here where the shape is. So we are actually applying this matte effect
to the whole track, not just the shape. Object. Yeah. Very easy. You can see, there is an icon here, the disabled
track icon, right? Click on it. Don't click on it. If you, if you, if you're single click on
it, it just going to hide it and show it. You can right. Click on this. And you've got the track matte mode, which
means it's going to turn that whole track into a mask. Right? So the same thing you want to select is the
alpha effect, which means it's going to see through. Only on the areas that are visible in the
object on top, which is in our case, the shape, right? Alpha. There you go. You've achieved the same exact effect. And actually this allows you to, if you want
to turn this into a reusable. That is fine, because as soon as you select
everything in your project, you can group it and add it to your library. And when you create a group in Camtasia, 20,
20, and 2021, this track matte effect is being copied inside of the group. So your effect will still work even though
you then move the object somewhere else, you disable the alpha track matte on that particular
track. Number two, it's no longer. Assigned or attached to the track itself. It becomes attached to the track inside the
group. Okay. So that may be a little bit hard to work around
and, you know, work in your mind because it's a little confusing. It was a little confusing at first for me
to. So now let me just turn this off because I
don't want to continue doing it the Camtasia 20, 20 way. So I'm going to go back to add the media mat
to my shapes. I'm back to my effect. You have a very nice benefit here with this
because you can now select everything and group it, which means. Your whole effect. Your whole thing is inside of a group, which
you can reuse in your projects. And more than that, if you have Camtasia 20,
21, this group actually has access now to the stuff on the right here that you see in
the properties. The quick properties editor was also introduced
in Camtasia 2021, and it allows you to change. The property of the objects inside of a group
without actually opening the group and going inside of this. So you can see now here that I can change
the shape and the color of the triangles. So if I want my marquee or my marching ants
to be a different color, I just need to click here and say, let's make them like red or
something. There you go. I'm changing the properties without actually
opening up and double clicking and going inside finding the actual object and all that. Plus it also allows you to change the text. So I want to say, oh, this text is important
that you go, and the text changes right in there. So this is a perfect way to create reusable
assets. You make the whole effect, work on its own
group. And then save it to your library and you have
a reusable component. Now I said, I promised I was going to show
you how to do this so that it doesn't look distorted like this. So there's more ways to do this. First of all, I'm just going to make a copy. So look, because this is a group, it's a very
nice object. You can move around, resize it and do whatever
you want with it. So I'm going to actually make a copy control
C and I'm going to paste one down here, down the line, and I'm going to show you another
version of this, which means if first of. If it's a rectangle, then this thing with
the corners is a little distorted, which is again, you may not like it. So if you change the shape, so let's go inside
of this group, click on this plus sign, go inside the group. And instead of a rectangle, I'm just going
to delete this rectangle and I'm going to bring a circle. So just go to annotation again, shape. So like the circle and just align it here. It doesn't really, you know, it doesn't have
to be perfectly centered, but if you want to, you can do that. And I'm going to just resize this kind of
here. Okay. The same thing we want to. Change the fill to be zero. So I don't want to see the field, but I want
to make an outline from it like this. There's make the outline thicker and go through
the timeline and make sure that this also spans the entire duration of the animation. You. And make sure that this circle you just created
is not on top of the text. It needs to be on top of the truck spinning
triangles, because it's going to act as a mask. So just drag it down here, just above the
triangles track, go to the visual effects again and use the media map on the circle
we just created. Like, so, so they go, this one looks very
nice because. It's a circle and the triangles are spinning
in a circle. So there you go. It's actually now works quite nice because
you don't see those allegations around the corners. Now you say, okay, well, but I don't want
to always to have a circle. Maybe I want to have a rectangle, but I don't
want to see. Weird you know, allegation around the corners,
not a problem. We can have a solution for that too. So I'm going to go outside of this group again
and select the first one with the rectangle and make another copy here. Just to show you how to do it, paste it in
there. So there it is. I'm just going to make it maybe larger like
this. Okay. So how do we solve this thing with the radial
triangles? Not a problem. Let's go inside the group and just completely
delete the triangle. Okay. So we just have, now the rectangle and the
text, not a problem. Let's go now and create the effect. I'm going to go. I'm out of this group for a second here. I'm actually, in fact, I'm going to ungroup
this because I want to work freely on the timeline. So instead of triangles, what I'm going to
do is use rectangles and not just any rectangles, they're going to be very tall. And very narrow, something like this. Okay. So what I want to do is I want to actually
create some parallel rectangles like this. So I'm just going to copy and paste this several
times. And I'm going to remove this for now because
I don't want it to get in the way. So look at these rectangles. It's up to you, how distant you want them
to be and how thick basically I'm just gonna duplicate them a bunch of times and I'm just
gonna eyeball this. Right? So don't worry about this being perfectly
spaced. Unfortunately, Camtasia does not have. A facility to align things and distribute
them. We can only hope, but I'm going to just keep
on selecting these and duplicating them. So there's a little bit of work before, but
once you create this and have a reusable pro asset, you have no need to worry about this
anymore. So look, I'm going to fill my whole canvas
with the. Rectangles like this. Okay. So one more time. I'm just going to put them all to the left,
sort of like this control C and V and just use the arrow keys to move them sideways. And then I may have made too many, but we
will find out in a minute if we have. Okay. So this is my rectangles. Quite a lot of them. I'm going to select all of them. So zoom out and just select everything control
G to group. When you group something Camtasia kind of
puts it on the constraints, that group to the canvas, which is not ideal because it's
I don't like it. And then it kind of clips them off. But anyway, I'll bring in the squares again
and look the text and the shape is now on top of the. Squares rectangles that I created. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually
rotate these sort of like that. But before I do that, I want to animate them,
right? So I'm not going to do it here. I'm going to go inside the group. And inside this group, you have all of those
rectangles. You can see come teachers kind of struggling
with them, select them all and group them again. Because I wanted to make it easy for me to
animate. So I'm going to go on the timeline somewhere. Let me zoom into the timeline here. So these are a group with my rectangles, right? So I'm going to create an animation shift
and a again, make the animation quite long because I want it to last for the whole duration,
right. Click on the animation, enable easing, make
it linear. And at the very end, what I want to do is
just move these all the way to the right. And on the left side, you can go back to the
first key frame and move them all the way to the left or almost now. Okay. You say, well, I can see what you're doing
here, but it's not really nice because then the left and the right lines are flickering. When the lines come out, not a problem. We can go back to this and just turn this
sort of like that. Right. So now we have a mark. On top of this thing, let me see, let's see
what's happening. I'll look at that. The market is working in and it's actually
is more realistic and more closer to the one that you see in various software. And if it's actually too slow, you can, you
can change the speed or, or you can change the distance they travel, or you can change
the animation length to make it shorter. So then it moves faster. And then you repeat that. As many times as you like, just to get, get
the thing longer. So I have found out that actually you can
take on an object or an animation and just duplicated and he's going to start doing it
again. But if you want it to move longer, if you
want it to move faster, you can always vary the end points to start in the end timeline
and the distance they travel in all of that. So I think this is quite a. Very much closer to what we wanted to see
in the first place. And again, you select this group, it all. So you have everything in one group. So now of course these options become available
to you, change the colors. And if you need to change the, sort of the,
the, the thickness of the shape, go inside the group, click on the shape and then make
it thicker like this. I mean, it looks like a construction site,
warning tape kind of thing. So there you go. This is the. And we've got a nice reusable marquee selection
thingy you can use. So you don't have to have that text inside
of that. If you want to take the text away and use
this on top of other things, it's perfectly transparent. And if I bring an image in here, let me show
you. So I brought a picture in my project and I'm
going to just put this on top of it. I'm going to just delete the text. I don't want any text on this, so let's suppose
I want to highlight this family or whatever, just resize it, you know, place it around
this like that. You can see it's transparent and it keeps
moving and it works fine. So very nice reusable. Christmas or something border around objects. So there it is. This is the work around the effect that is
not included in Camtasia, but it's quite easy to achieve. Once you understand the workings of the media
matte effect or in Camtasia 2021, the track matte effect achieves the same thing. So I hope this was useful for you. Thank you for watching so far. And if you want to get these components already
made, you can find the link in the description. Well, you can go and buy this particular component. All of these three variations and possibly
other shapes like triangles, stars, you know, you can buy these from my buy me a coffee
account or for my downloadables files account. You can download them from there and reuse
them every time you like. And of course it would help support my work
if you did. And if you don't have Camtasia 20, 21, by
the way, there is a link in the description to upgrade, and that is an affiliate link. So. Support my channel, my work with Camtasia
and the tutorials I'm creating. So I would really appreciate it. It would mean no extra cost to you. So thank you again for watching and see you
next time.
