Character Intro FREEZE Effect in Camtasia Tutorial

Halon Naylor here and in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to make this very cool character intro freeze effect in Camtasia let's get started here in Camtasia let's go ahead and import a video clip and we'll drop it on the timeline let's take a look and I'll make a few points as to what kinds of video clips probably work best for this trick as you can see the subject of our intro our gal here is really kind of by herself there's not a lot of other people or objects that can be identified in the clip and that's going to be important because in a minute we're gonna isolate her as a transparent image and another point is that our gal here is kind of off to the side which is gonna leave us some room to put our introductory text or any other graphics or effects we might want to use so I'm gonna pick this particular point in time so with the playhead here I'm going to click on the clip and I'm going to split it and before moving the playhead or doing anything else I'm gonna go to share and export frame as well save it as a PNG file and also notice this little checkbox here little Camtasia tip I'm also going to make sure this is checked to import our still frame into the media bin give it a name and save it so that's gonna save a copy to our hard drive of this still image and also pull it into the clip in the next step is I'm gonna head over to one of my favorite resources called remove dot BG and then let's take our still image and drop it onto the site remove dot BG is gonna do its remove BG thing and what we're going to end up with is a version of this still image that has just our gal cut out and the background removed now you could do this kind of thing Photoshop or any other graphics tool if you have the chops and the software but I love this tool because it does an absolutely superb job of removing the background next we have a couple of options on the download button here if I click this you can see that I can get a full high res image but that'll cost a couple of bucks for free I can go ahead and download this preview image which is of a decent quality and that's what I'm going to choose at this point it has a name removed out BG preview and we'll save this in our project directory next let's head back to camp Tasha and we'll go ahead and import this into the media bin as well remove dot BG and I'll go ahead and right click and add to Timeline at playhead so now we have our removed background image and again because I didn't get the high-res version I'm just gonna have to go ahead and resize this and what you notice is with the background of her removed putting it on top at the same size it just looks like her but in reality we have two copies the next thing I'll do is when you add an image it has a default duration here and if we right-click on this we can see that it's five seconds so I'm gonna want to decide how long I want our girl here to stay frozen just be aware that you have the option here to change this if you want to be longer or shorter figure out how long you want it to be there and we're good to go next let's grab our clip that we split and move it till it snaps to the end and remember that copy of the still image that we imported into the media bin let's click on this and drag it down to fill the hole adjust our length let's take a quick look at what we've done so far we have our video clip it freezes and then it will go ahead and resume playing now there are lots of ways that we can spice this thing up but let's try a couple of things let's click on our gal on the canvas here right click and I'm gonna add a visual effect we're gonna add a drop shadow now normal drop shadow is kind of boring so what I'm going to do is I want to create like a halo glow effect so let's do that by adding a color something nice and bright and then also I'm going to set the angle to the center so that the halo goes all the way around her and isn't just skewed off to one angle or another let's boost up the opacity make it a little bolder and maybe even add a little more blur and there we go let's go ahead and add that zoom effect so I'm going to move the playhead in a little bit and again with our transparent character here selected let's go to animations and the animations tab and I'm going to drop a custom keyframe right click and add to selected media you can also do it with the Camtasia hotkeys which is my preferred method which would be shift a so at this keyframe what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go up to the properties and scale our gal up for a zoom effect and what we need to do here is kind of position her so that she covers up the gal underneath and get that dialed in as best we can that's pretty good and then to put her back in place let's move the playhead down some more and this time instead of a custom keyframe we're going to use the very handy restore animation what that's going to do is it's going to take her back to her original size and position let's move this who it touches the end and this goes to the beginning and by default animations might be a little bit long but let's give this a look and see how it shaping up now I will kind of warn you that the preview engine in Camtasia kind of sucks so if you just hit the spacebar or the play button here it might look a little bit jerky and in a case like that a lot of times what I'll do is I'll put the playhead just before the effect make a highlight and then right click and produce timeline selection as I kick out a little bit of a test video it's really the only way to kind of be sure of what's actually happening because again the preview is kind of weak so now we have kind of interesting zoom effect and we could just drop a text call-out or shape here and add our introductory text call it a day but there are some other cool things and concepts that we can look at so let's embellish it a little more shall we no snap the playhead to the beginning here and let's bump this image up a track let's go to the media bin and import one more piece of media and here I have a shape let's open that and let's drop it in between our frozen frame on the bottom and our transparent gal on the top I'm also going to lock the top track so since it's in between our background and our transparent gal you can see that it comes in kind of behind her so let's size this up a bit position it do pretty much anything you want here you can rotate it I can hold the shift key and the long gate it and basically just kind of position it where I want now you might be wondering why I use kind of a boring gray shape here and I actually did this on purpose this particular shade of gray is very handy in Camtasia and here's why I'm gonna right click on it and I'm going to add a colorize effect when you do that because it is a gray tone or greyscale color the colorize effect works wonderfully so by default it's a hideous lime-green but you can change it to pretty much any color you want and in our case I think I'm just gonna use a simple white but I love the fact that it has the ability to be that versatile I actually created this shape in PowerPoint and I put a couple of these shapes together for you in a zip file that you can download at the link below let's trim it up to fit our freeze frame length and then I'm gonna drop a text call-out on top of the whole pile and pick a font I'm gonna use one called dark underground because it kind of fits the grunge look let's boost it up and again just kind of position and place it however you want again let's trim it to our freeze duration and to help kind of sell the effect let's click on the graphic element hold my control key and click on the text let's go to behaviors and I'm gonna add a little bit of drama with a scale behavior with both objects selected I can add it to both with a single drag and drop the other benefit there is that they'll both kind of scale in at the same time and be in sync and everything shrinks out and continues what else could we do let's take our bottom image and right click on it on the canvas and let's add a visual effect of a color adjustment I'm going to change the brightness to zero and the contrast to zero and that will turn the background to a grayscale this kind of helps her pop off even a little bit more and to make it just a little bit smoother let's go to the transitions tab and we'll add a short fade on both ends of that and let's see how that looks so that's how I created my sample and of course there's all kinds of things that you can do here let's unlock this I'm going to right click here and insert a track below our brush let's go to the annotations special and I'm going to add a blur effect so that's even another way to help our gal pop off even more but remember it's this concept of layers that lets us do all kinds of interesting things to help pull the whole thing together now again you don't have to do all this stuff fact let's move this out of the way and let's take our brush out of the way you could just make it really simple and just use call-outs like adding a shape and creating your effect that way and it still looks pretty cool so I hope you found that useful leave your questions and comments and again I put together a couple of these interesting shapes and stuff for you in a zip file that you can download hit the link below thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Lon Naylor

Views: 13,529

Keywords: camtasia, lon naylor, powerpoint, lonnaylor, camtasia effects, freeze frame, freeze effect, freeze effect camtasia, camtasia tutorial, camtasia intro, camtasia intro tutorial, character introduction freeze effect

Id: TX9ENyiPkUs

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020