Do you want to take your videos to the
next level by making them interactive? Well, in this video I'm going to show you
an easy way to add interactivity to your video projects without coding, using the
video editing application Camtasia. Hey, it's Mike with more tips and tools
to help you create engaging, informative, and educational video. And if it's your
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Interactivity seems to be the holy grail of online media these days, whether
you're making educational videos, or product demos for your video marketing.
But up until now, creating an interactive video was beyond the reach of most of us.
It required coding and some fairly sophisticated and complex software. Well,
that's no longer the case with software application packages like Camtasia.
Camtasia is a screen capture and video editing application, but it also has the
ability to create interactive videos using a feature called
Hotspots. In a nutshell hotspots allow you to create interactive areas in your
video. Let's hop on into Camtasia so I can show you how Hotspots work. So, here
we are in Camtasia. This is Camtasia 3 for Mac. There's also a Windows version
of Camtasia that's up to version 9. Hotspots work exactly the same way in
both versions, so whether you're on Mac or Windows this tutorial will be useful.
So, I've created this demo project, here. I have this video on my timeline and we're
going to make it interactive using Hotspots. So, to get started I'll go over
to the Media Panel and I'll scroll down and select the
Visual Effects section, not the Interactivity section, as you'd expect. If
you go to the Interactivity section you'll only find Camtasia's interactive
quiz feature, not hotspots. Not terribly intuitive, I know. You'd think you'd find
Hotspots in the Interactivity section. We have to go to the Visual Effects
section and there at the bottom is Interactive Hotspots. Okay, let's add a Hotspot to our project. To do that I'll click and drag a Hotspot onto the
timeline and... what's going on here, where is the Hotspot? Well, what you need to
understand is that Hotspots are not an object under themselves. They don't exist
on their own in Camtasia. To make a Hotspot work you need to add it to another
object. You can add Hotspots to pretty much any type of media object in your
project - a shape, a piece of text, an image, even a video clip. This will make
more sense if I show it to you, so let's back up. Remember, Hotspots need to be
attached to a media object, so the first thing I'm going to do is create an
object for the Hotspot. I'm going to create a button and I'm going to do that
using a Callout. So, I'm going to scroll up in the Media Panel and select
Annotations and select the Callouts section,
and we have this wide selection of Callouts. I'm just going to grab this
simple Callout, here and I'm going to click and drag it down onto my timeline
and line it up with the end of this section of the video. As you can see, a
Callout is just some text with a shape for a background. We can edit the text in
this Callout by simply double-clicking it then I'll enter "Button 1" as my label
and I can place this Callout button anywhere on the screen by clicking and
dragging it, here, in the canvas. I'll just place it, here, for now. To make this
Callout button work like a button I'll add a Hotspot to it. So, I'll go to Visual
Effects and scroll down to the bottom to Interactive Hotspot.
I'll click and drag the Interactive Hotspot and drop it onto my Callout
button in the timeline. You can also drag the Hotspot onto the actual Callout on
the Canvas. So, I'll drop the Hotspot on the
Callout button and now this Callout button is clickable. Okay, so our Hotspot
is in place with our Callout button selected. Have a look way over here at
the Properties Panel. Make sure you have the Visual Properties tab selected and
when you scroll down you'll see you have settings for Interactive Hotspot. This is
where we make our Hotspot actually do something. The first setting is Pause at
End and it's checked by default. What that means is when the playhead reaches
the end of the Callout clip containing the Hotspot the Playhead will stop and
wait until the Hotspot is clicked. When the Hotspot is clicked one of four
events can occur and those four events are represented by these four choices,
here. You'll notice the fourth choice down here Click to Continue is selected
by default. This means that when the user clicks the Hotspot the Playhead will
resume playing from where it stopped. If we select URL and enter a URL or web
address in this field, here, when the user clicks the Callout button that webpage
will appear in a new browser window. Marker jumps the Playhead to a specific
marker on the timeline. When the user clicks the Hotspot. To create a marker,
you can go over here to this little arrow at the end of the Timeline.
Clicking that opens this new track in the Timeline and you can use this new
track to place Markers. So, if I select Marker and run my cursor along this
track I get this blue cross icon which represents a Marker. So, I can drag to a
spot click and that creates a Marker on the timeline. You can also place markers
directly on media clips in your timeline. You just find a spot on the clip and
click and that places a Marker. And if you select your Marker then go over to
its properties in the Properties Panel you can rename it to keep things
organized. I'm going to rename mine "Button 1."
To get out of Marker placement mode you just go back to that arrow at the end of
the timeline and click it to close the Marker track. Now if I go back and select
my Callout Hotspot to bring up its properties in the Properties Panel and
select Marker, you'll see this dropdown menu that displays all the Markers in
your project. So, here's the marker we created: "Button 1." I'll select that so
when the user clicks the Callout Hotspot the Playhead will jump to the
"Button 1" Marker. Below marker we have Time. If you select this option when the
user clicks the Hotspot the Playhead will jump to a specific timecode in your
project. And you enter that timecode in these fields right here. So, how do you
know what timecode to enter. Well, you can find the current timecode of the
Playhead right beside it. It's these numbers right, here. So, you
just drag the Playhead to the spot on your timeline that you want to jump to,
make note of the timecode, then enter the timecode over here in the Time
field. Now, you've probably noticed this Test button down here. You use this to
make sure the Hotspot is linking to the correct destination. For example, we
currently have Time selected and this timecode that we want the playhead to
go to when the user clicks the Callout. Well, let's see if the Hotspot actually
goes to that timecode, and we can do that by clicking Test and the Playhead
jumps to the timecode we entered. We can test it with the Marker option. Let's
select the Marker option and select our one and only Marker, "Button 1" from the
dropdown list, and we'll go down and click Test and the Playhead jumps to our
Button 1 Marker. Let's try URL. I'll select the URL option
and enter the URL of my website. I'll move down and click Test
and a browser window opens up and there is the homepage of my site. The testing feature is really useful, but
how can we be sure all of our Hotspots are working properly, how can we really
test the interactivity of our project? Well, unfortunately you can't preview
your interactive project here in the Camtasia editor. All you can do is use
the Test button to test the targets for the Hotspots. To truly test the
interactivity of your Camtasia project you need to publish it, so that's what
I'm going to do. I'm going to pause the video so I can build out this project
with a few more Hotspots and when I come back I'll publish the project so we can
test it out. Okay, I'm back. I added a few different
types of Hotspots to our project with additional Markers as you can see. So,
let's publish this to see if everything is working. To publish your interactive
project be sure to save it first then go up to Share on the top menu bar and
select Local File from the dropdown. You'll get this export dialog window. So,
I'm going to name our project "Interactive Test." We'll export it to the desktop. We'll
leave everything set to the defaults, except we'll select Export as Web Page.
You need to have this option selected in order to export interactive projects out
of Camtasia. You'll see why in just a moment. In the Windows version of
Camtasia the export process looks a bit different. When you go up to the top menu
and select Share and then select Local File you get this Production Wizard
Panel. You want to click the dropdown arrow and select mp4 with Smart Player
up to 480p, mp4 with Smart Player up to 720p, or mp4 with Smart Player up to
1080p, depending on the final resolution of your video. The key is the Smart
Player. It's what makes the interactivity happen in your exported video. So, I'm
gonna select mp4 with Smart Player up to 720p because that is the resolution of
my demo project. You get a description of the export
preset you selected and if you look down here in the description area you can see
that it says Interactive Features such as TOC, which is Table of Contents, Closed
Captions, Quizzes and Hotspots are included in the video. Then you just go
down here and hit Next and then on this screen you give your
project a name, select or create a destination folder and hit Finish. Back over on the Mac, I'll hit Export and
Camtasia will generate the necessary files. Once Camtasia is done exporting, I'll go
find our published project on the Desktop.
So, here's our published project. It's a folder and if we double-click it to open
it we'll find a webpage called "index.html" and a folder labeled "media." If
we open the media folder we'll find a collection of files -
JavaScript files, video files, all kinds of different scripts. These files make up
our interactive project. So, if you wanted to share your interactive Camtasia
project online you'd need to grab this folder, containing the "index.html" webpage and the "media" folder and upload it to your web server, or Amazon s3, or
Screencast.com, which is a hosting service offered by TechSmith, the makers
of Camtasia. Once your project is uploaded you'd create a link to this
"index.html" page and that link will launch your interactive project in a
browser window. However, you don't need to upload these files to a web server in
order to test your interactive Camtasia project. You can test it right on your
computer, locally by just double-clicking this
"index.html" file. Your interactive Camtasia
project will load into your default web browser and you can test the
interactivity. So, let's see what we've got.
I'll hit the Play arrow to start our interactive video.
"A good quality webcam can be a versatile and cost-effective tool for creating
high quality learning videos if you know how to use it properly. If you want to
get the best possible video out of these little cameras follow these four steps." "I'm recording right now using the blue
Yeti Pro USB microphone placed just not a shot." "If you want to drastically improve the
quality of your webcam video invest in a good external microphone." Just one last really important point
regarding Hotspots. I'm just going to go down on a Timeline, here, and zoom in a
bit so that you can see better. Now, remember this Pause at End setting in
the hot spots Properties Panel? It causes the Playhead to stop when it reaches the
end of the Hotspot object on the Timeline. Well, in order for this setting
to work properly in the final video the Hotspot object on the timeline needs to
be at least half a second or 15 frames long. Any shorter and the interactive
video player won't have enough time to register the pause properly and your
video won't pause at the end of that Hotspot. It'll just keep going right through
or it'll pause a few frames late. Just something to keep in mind when you're
creating Hotspots. The ability to add interactive Hotspots to just about any
media object in Camtasia opens up a lot of creative possibilities. With some
solid planning and a bit of imagination, you could create a pretty engaging and
immersive video experience. Well that's it for this video experience. I hope you
found value in it. And if you want to discover more tips and tools for
creating engaging, informative, and educational video, be sure to hit the big
subscribe button on the screen, so you don't miss a thing. Thanks for watching,
and I'll see you next time.
