Diving Deeper into Camtasia - Advanced Timeline Usage

hello welcome to today's diving deeper and camtasia webinar i'm mike quiayon soo product marketing manager at techsmith over the next 45 minutes or so we'll explore how to better manage and navigate your video projects as well as expose advanced timeline features to make your video editing process more efficient today we're going to be using camtasia 2020 on windows however older versions and mac are okay we'll do our best to call out any differences that you may see on the screen with what we're demoing and with the advances of camtasia 2020 some of the more powerful features may only be available in 2020 if that is true we will be sure to call it out we do have a little bit of housekeeping to address before we dive into this webinar though with that being said i now want to turn things over to the star of the show jason velade hello jason hey mike i don't know about star of the show but i'm certainly happy to be here and walk through this deeper dive with you folks jason's being modest he is a star and everyone you're lucky to get to experience it today because in addition to being an instructional designer at techsmith and an atd master trainer jason possesses a wealth of camtasia knowledge so if you're ready to share some of that jason let's get started with poll so the way this webinar is going to work is i have an existing project sitting here in my editor camtasia 2020 on windows and we want to go over a lot of the functionality of the timeline not everything but a lot maybe some things you may have already known about maybe something you're discovering for the first time or a combination of different tool sets to get you up and running before i start any of these i do want to draw your attention to one major thing and that is if you go into the edit menu at the top of your screen and drop down to preferences in the preferences menu there is a shortcut tab across the top and underneath the shortcuts there are two timeline specific menus one for timeline editing and one for timeline navigation every one of these shortcuts are customizable now of course we ship them with specific shortcuts in mind but if you have a series of shortcuts that you are more familiar with or you want to change them to match perhaps another program or you have multiple computers and you want them all to be the same you can create your own shortcuts for some of the things we're talking about today and if you have camtasia 2020 it's really easy to share that set of shortcuts with either yourself or another teammate if you want to have that consistency across your machines so just want to make sure i called that out it's in the preferences shortcuts tab where you can edit and change any of the keyboard shortcuts associated with not only the timeline but many many functions and feature sets within camtasia all right the camtasia editor timeline so for those who aren't familiar the timeline is the bottom section of the editor here the editor is normally broken up into four parts you got your media bin library and tool area up in the upper left hand corner your canvas or some people call the preview window in the middle of your screen over here on the right we have the properties panel which dynamically changes depending on the type of media that you have selected and then here at the bottom you have your timeline so first things first one thing i want to show for the majority of you who might not know this you can actually show more of your timeline by coming up to the bottom of your canvas and hovering your mouse over right here where your mouse will turn into a double-sided arrow if i click and drag my canvas up i can expose more tracks on my timeline so in my situation i currently have a six track setup where tracks one through five have various types of media on them and track six i've renamed yep you can do that and i'll show you how to do that in a second you can rename it and i have it labeled as captions because this is where my captions are because i did closed captions this is an actual video that i produced i think it's been live for about a week and a half uh all about creating a how-to video so one thing i always love to show is that you can expose more of your timeline here by clicking on the bottom of the canvas and dragging it up or down depending on your needs now something that's new to camtasia 2020 is the ability to detach your timeline that's right if you right click in your timeline or use the keyboard shortcut on windows at least control three you can detach your timeline and make it its own individual window well some people say well why would i want to do that well there's a couple reasons in my mind you've always been able to detach the canvas and when you detach the canvas i typically put that on a second monitor or i actually have a an older tv but it's like one of those flat screen smart tvs in my office where i can send the canvas over and have it at full screen and watch the video back in what its full form would look like well a lot of us have the pleasure and the experience to have a widescreen monitor that i could put this timeline on not only to put it by itself and be able to then make it a full screen application so that i can have multiple tracks visible at once but it allows you to really take advantage of the real estate of those larger monitors or larger projection screens it can be really helpful for those who want more control over the editing experience so that the timeline itself can stay separate from the editor if you separate it and you're done and you kind of want to bring them back together it's as simple as closing that window in this case for windows hitting the x it'll close the timeline back out and insert it back here into the editor at the state you left it in so you can make all your changes and then bring it back and you can continue editing in camtasia in a normal format here okay so that is the first couple things i want to show you about the timeline the next is something fairly basic but what we've talked about in other webinars because it is an important aspect of your timeline and that is the idea of being able to add tracks so to add a track typically if we were to add a piece of media to this timeline you know you could right click on a piece of media and say add to the timeline at the playhead if there's a space on one of the tracks the media will drop in there but if there's something in the way it'll create its own track for that media if i want to add my own tracks and this is true with camtasia 2020 because of the ability to create track mats and you have to have them in certain positions you would right click on a track on the name itself over here on the left and you can insert a track either above it or below it my normal use case for adding a track right off the bat typically is i'll come down to track number one and i will right click on it and insert a track below it and i almost always use track number one for my music bed or my background music it's just how high how i normally do my editing i like to have my music on its own track so that i can keep track of it and be able to adjust its audio points and levels and volume all those sorts of things come into play when i add tracks like this and i start to get what i would describe being a complex set of timelines here that's where renaming tracks come into play as you saw earlier i named this track my captions track and i can do that by right clicking once again on the track name and choosing rename track so instead of track 1 i might put bg music which for me i know is background music i'm able to name the tracks like that so i can keep them nice and organized this helps a lot when i've zoomed in on my timeline we'll talk about that in a second because when we do screen recordings in camtasia camtasia will label the media what it is in this case if we zoom in by using this zoom feature on top of the timeline here it'll say that this particular recording right here is my screen recording but if i scroll past that naming convention i no longer know that necessarily that's my screen recording so that's where it might be helpful to rename a particular track screen recording or rename a track webcam you can name them however you want or need to make sure that you are most organized in your project for the best level of success going along with adding tracks into your timeline is something called the z order z as in zebra so the z order is showing the tracks in their order where what is visible is on the screen over something else for example i have uh right here at the let's see it's the minute and 20 second mark or minute 18 mark here i have my screen recording visible here on the in the canvas this is what's playing on my video but when i advance the playhead i have this group that's sitting above it this is a call out where i've added a behavior and some text because this group is sitting above my screen recording in the z order like the z-axis order of the uh timeline it is visible if i took this group and dragged it below my screen recording it's still there in fact i can see its outline sitting there behind my screen recording but because the screen recording is higher in the z order it's in front of that group in fact if i move my recording out of the way there is that callout that clean up your desktop callout yet if i need it to be visible i would bring it back up above so that it's on top of or higher in the z order than my screen recording so it's kind of simple basic concept but something a lot of people might miss so i can see where things are stacked on my video here in fact later on i have a series of callouts that are stacked on top of each other across multiple tracks and we'll get to that a little later to show you what that looks like in terms of z order so let's talk a couple of tool sets at once and a lot of them are going to revolve around this this is the playhead inside the camtasia editor this tool ends up being a lot more powerful than people give it credit for the playhead of course as you hit the play button on the canvas in the editor here or by using the keyboard shortcut spacebar will play your video back and the playhead will move along the video and correspond with or keep in sync everything that's on the screen so you can see what's happening at the same time but the playhead has a lot of other tools associated with it primarily this green and red tab on either side of it the green and red tab is what turns this playhead into the selection tool and the selection tool has uh i'm going to use the word plethora and i apologize but a plethora of things associated with it you can do a lot with the selection tool first and foremost i use the selection tool to make what i call wholesale changes to my video perhaps cuts of removal of errors and stuff like that to use the selection tool you can do it one of a couple of ways the easiest way in my opinion is to click and drag the handles either to the right or to the left to make a selection while it is selected i've got this section of my video selected if i were to play the video back the playhead will only play what's in this space so let's play this back here for just a second the ones that i work with every day what you're looking at right now okay so it just played back that section well why is that helpful no if i'm trying to edit a word out or in my case i try and edit out the up breaths before i speak like today we want to talk about camtasia i can do very precise edits using that selection tool i can use the selection tool in combination with the aforementioned zoom slider over here in fact if i zoom in all the way to get high detail on the timeline i can actually see frame by frame what's happening in my video so i can make adjustments a frame at a time that could be helpful for removing like cough noises or mouth noises or any kind of finite surgical cut i want to make so while selection is made there's several things you can do like i said one of which is doing that restricted playback so it just plays back the area that is selected if i select the media within that selection area in this case my screen recording and i go over to my properties panel and choose the audio tab which is located at the top to expose the overall volume level i can also use the selection tool in fact let me scooch it down here just a little bit while that's exposed i can use that to click and drag the volume down for just that section to silence a section out so if i didn't want to cut what was happening on the screen i could just silence a section a little bit at a time or a lot at a time perhaps this is a section i want to voice over or borrow someone else at techsmith to do the voiceover i can do all of that as well the biggest thing however people use the selection tool for is to make those wholesale edits which includes deletions and cuts well let's talk about a delete first if i make a selection with the selection tool and i hit delete on my keyboard that content is removed from the timeline but it leaves a large gap in my presentation i happen to have my canvas colored white for this one you may normally have it colored black i just used it for a design element earlier on but now when i delete something using the selection tool and the delete key i leave a gap in my presentation which might be helpful maybe i want to insert something into that space or i want to make some other changes let's go ahead and undo that either by using ctrl z or by going over here to our ribbon and using the undo key i could do something called instead of delete i could do a cut a cut is performed either by using the keyboard shortcut control x a lot of people know that as cut but i find it easier to actually go back over to the ribbon and use the scissors button the scissors button when i click on it will not only remove that content like the delete key did but it performs what's called a ripple delete what that means is as i move the playhead back it'll remove that content but then it'll take everything to the right of the cut that we made slide it back over here to the left and stitch it together so that it's one continuous piece of media where the gap isn't noticeable visibly but maybe my audio won't make sense but in this example it's quite all right so let's undo that as well to take us back to where we were now some people when they make a selection they didn't mean to make the selection in fact they'd like to deselect that area or perhaps they've taken the playhead and it's moved outside of that selection area don't worry i can easily deselect this section and put the playhead and selection tool back together this is done by double clicking the playhead which deselects the selection you made no changes have been made the selection tool goes back onto the playhead and you're right back in a state where you can edit all right time to talk about something with the selection tool that's very specific to camtasia 2020 that is if we make some selections on our timeline let's say little ones here and i'm going to use the delete key so i'm not using the cut tool at all i'm just making selections i'm like i want to get rid of this i want to get rid of this and i want to get rid of this well i've only done it three or four times here and that's gonna leave those giant gaps like we had before now i could manually drag those over but that's time takes a lot of time and i don't have the time when i have to edit further parts of the video well that's what brings in something called track magnetization and the magnetization button track magnets is found over here right by the track name when you click on track magnetization for a particular track and let's zoom back out so we can see the entirety of our project here i went a little too far for myself there we go track magnetization when it's turned on it will actually magnetize everything on that particular track and snap everything together to the left so the giant gap you see here as well as the gaps i just made are removed okay they will be magnetized by clicking on the magnet everything gets snapped over to the left so there's zero gaps there's not going to be a playback every video and then a flash of a white screen or black screen or whatever happens to be your canvas color which typically happens when people remove content and forget to close those gaps so you'll know a track is magnetized because the magnet icon will be lit up here on the left as well as this chevron pattern located on the right to show you that the track was magnetized now one thing to note with track magnetization is it only magnifies this track so everything else in your project stays in the exact same place so if you had things timed up to that track that will affect that sort of playback it won't be lined up the way it was so let me undo here back to the state we were in where we didn't have those gaps my suggestion to people when they're using track magnetization is to use it when they're doing their first initial screen recording where they're making their cuts and there's only one track of media to work with at a time it'll allow you to snap those things together and remove those gaps now i could use track magnetization and or any kind of manipulation of the tracks and not affect other ones and i want to show what that looks like over here on the left as well so at the track name on the far left we've seen what track magnetization can do let's talk about the other two icons that are sitting there the top one which looks like an eyeball is called disable track and i actually have my caption track currently disabled what that means is the captions are there i didn't delete them or remove them but right now i have them hidden from playback because when i produce this video i want a video that has no captions burnt into it if i click on that track visibility tab i can see that my captions show up and as i play the video back all the captions are there just like i would want them to be but i can turn them off whenever i want to without negatively affecting my project because they're still there for me later on big part of track visibility is i could have a series of tracks trying out different elements maybe a different color call out a different style of music and i can hide them and still play back my video or produce different versions of my video if i wanted to see what they look like i can also make edits to my project without affecting a particular track or a series of tracks by using the other icon located here at the bottom on the left calling locking tracks so if i have a track here which in this case is a music track and i have it exactly the way i want i don't want to change it at all it's set and i don't want to mess it up at all i can lock the track which doesn't allow me to make any changes to it as it's locked i can't cut things accidentally but if i play my video back the music will be involved in it still so let's play this back you should still hear music so tell me if this sounds familiar you've written up instructions for your students so kind of hear that background music so i can still see how that music plays in with my video but i can make changes to the video without worrying about whether or not it's going to affect that background music so i've used these in conjunction with each other i'll lock several tracks maybe hide one maybe magnetize one it's the way to be able to access uh specific parts of your video without affecting other parts that you want to leave locked down now one thing we're not going to get into in this particular webinar but still has something to do with these icons is with camtasia 2020 we've included a extremely powerful and flexible tool called track mats and those are accessible by going to the visibility button and right clicking on it to expose the track matte mode we won't go over that today and there is a link on the document that mike mentioned earlier linked to a playlist that we've created called the camtasia insider series it's on youtube that can teach you everything you want to know about track mats and we are constantly adding to that all right so i'm going to pause here for just a second mike and take a sip of water that's what i wanted to cover for the basics before we get even deeper into timeline functionality using the selection tool and other kind of fun things so have there been any questions that have come in so far that i could address while we're live here in the webinar yeah jason we have a couple of quick you know potentially clarification questions for you um so steve was wondering when you hide or mute those tracks and then you export your project will that tracks content also be suppressed in the mp4 video yes it will so that's a great point so in my example here i have my video with my track visibility for my captions turned off so if i produce this video outside of camtasia the video will be in its completed form it will just be missing those burnt in captions sitting here on the screen the same way if i left that hidden and then i came down to another track and hid say well let's hide my introductory track and i have my captions turned on if i produce this video the way it appears on my canvas right now is exactly the way it'll show up outside camtasia so the point being is if you produce your video and it's exactly the way you want it as visit visible on the canvas that's what your mp4 will look like that's what allows you to iterate and create those multiple versions of the video by using one as a standard starting point so good question steve thank you great and another one here renee wanted to know what if we want to delete part of a video in a particular track so you're only removing a section from a specific track yeah uh so that what you would do for that that's a great question happens often for me so um if we were so let's just start this if i were to use my selection tool and i made a selection from this point to this point in my video and said hit delete what i want you to notice is tracks caption through track one down here are all part of the selection tool if i hit delete it removes everything in that section except for the tracks that aren't visible right so it has deleted everything in there so i maybe only had wanted we'll just undo that to delete this stuff on track four the way i typically do it is there's a couple ways i can either split just this piece of media and delete it by using the hotkey of s but if i want to use the selection tool i would probably resort to locking the other tracks that i did not want to affect so now i've locked all the tracks that aren't track number four and when i hit delete it only deletes the items on track number four because the rest are locked or protected from any effect easy to do when you have only a couple tracks a little bit more tedious to do when you have say 15 20 or more tracks and i have seen projects like that and i think i topped out at 33 tracks one time that was long before we could group things together but yeah that's one thing to know if you don't want to affect other tracks when you're moving creating deletion points or removing things lock the tracks you do not want to affect and you should be just fine thanks jason you bet and one final one final one here that is a little bit of an opportunity for you to maybe explain something but it came in as a form of a question from jennifer does extend frame only work if you separate audio and video and i think what would be maybe be helpful is if you could explain to people that don't know what extend a frame is and and why you might want to use that sure so that'll lead into uh the next section of the webinar today so great job with the timing of that question jennifer so for example let's start back with a couple of tips that i want to use that are going to incorporate jennifer's question there's often a need when you've made a video to create a gap for either new media or to extend a frame which we'll talk about in a sec here in the middle of a project now i need to look at my entire project as a whole so let me show you a quick pro tip here on the zoom slider which i've already used a few times in the webinar there is a magnifying glass here on the left if you click on the magnifying glass it brings the entirety of your project into a viewable area so this video is 9 minutes and 20 seconds long and i can see everything from the beginning over here on the left all the way to the end and the reason i want to show this is i think right here i want to create a gap and the reason i want to create a gap is i need this part of my screen it's got this contextual menu here on screen longer than i had recorded it for so let's play this video back for just a second and see when i stop showing that on my screen choose view and then click show desktop icons okay so right about there is where i need it to stay on the screen except i need to go back a little bit this is where some timeline navigation comes into play as well you can always zoom in on your timeline and make adjustments sliding the playhead from the left to the right or i can use my keyboard for real common movements for example if you look at your keyboard to the right of the m key there should be a comma and a period but above it is your greater than less than arrows well you can use those greater than less than arrows to move your playhead one frame at a time forward or backwards so if i want to back mine up just a little bit i'm going to hit my comma or my less than key until i break right back there so this is where it stopped showing up this is the last frame it was available on okay so i have that ready for me on my screen as i needed it now to create that gap so that we can get to jennifer's question i have my playhead exactly where i want this is kind of a hidden pro tip but it's probably one i use in every video i've made if you hold your shift key on your keyboard and click and drag your playhead to the right i can create a gap on my timeline but not only am i creating this gap but i have kept everything to the right that i've worked so hard on for timing and positioning everything stays in sync by using that click with the shift key and dragging the playhead to the right super super powerful excellent helpful tip you'll use it quite often so the question that jennifer then asked was if you want to extend a frame which in this case is where i want to keep my frame on the screen i can do that by bringing my playhead over to where i want it to be in this case i'm going to zoom in just a little bit and i'm going to use the less than greater than on my keyboard to bring the playhead back right to the frame that i want it to stay at which is this one i can extend the frame of this recording by right-clicking and either choosing extend frame using the keyboard shortcut shift e or my favorite way actually is by hovering over it over the end by using the alt key and it changes the cursor to this extend frame option and then clicking and dragging it to the right as long as i need it here on my screen and now that i've already extended it i've created an extension of that individual frame this allows it to stay frozen on the screen and maybe allows me to add some other context on the screen perhaps voicing that section over now why this goes to your question jennifer is because this was my screen recording that has both my screen recording and my voice baked into it it leaves the audio behind and just extends that single visible frame okay so the video will stop well video will continue to play but my voice will stop wherever i made that extension their desktop let's go further up here and then click show desktop icons so then it's frozen here and i can say you know make sure you know that these aren't hidden forever you can turn them back on or turn them off as you need it just make sure you remove all visible distractions from your recording whatever my voiceover happens to be and when it's done and i'm ready for it to to close this gap i would probably use the trimming capability which is hovering over the end of a piece of media like this and clicking and dragging to the left until it snaps right to that playhead and then i can close my gap with a lot of control by double clicking on the piece of media that i originally moved which snaps that playhead into place and then just repeating that process backwards holding shift on my keyboard and clicking and dragging to the left until those pieces of media match up now there's no gap there just like with track magnetization and then the video would continue on as if i had recorded it the way it's shown the check mark gets removed and all the icons become hidden okay so the long answer to your question is that jennifer the short answer is yes you can extend a frame without separating audio and video now some of you might be asking what does that even mean well if you have a screen recording without your webcam so you recorded your screen and you talked through a process it comes into the editor as a single piece of media you can right click on that piece of media and separate the audio and video and you can edit them independently if you so choose i rarely if ever do this for a couple of reasons one if you separate your audio and video it is separate forever it can't be baked back into one piece of media again it can be grouped later but i typically keep them together the other reason is if i somehow move one piece of media to the left or one piece to the right then the movements on the screen might not match up to my audio not a big deal more of a personal preference i never do it with webcam because then it looks like i have a badly dubbed video where my mouth is moving but the audio doesn't match up so that's where we typically talk about those sorts of things let's talk about a little bit more finite control that we have over the timeline and it still goes to our tracks and i typically do this particular movement when i have audio on the track for example i have this ambient background music that's part of my introduction i can see the wav files they're a little small down there so i'm going to actually make an adjustment to the size of the track itself the actual height and i can do it a couple different ways one way is to hover at the top of the track itself and click and drag the track up and i can increase its size to give a little bit more detail especially when it comes to audio and i can drag that back down if i want and it has a minimum size which is right here or i can lean on the tool at the left side of the two of the track wow the left side of the timeline underneath the ribbon where i can click and drag these up where it uniformly increases the size of the tracks this would come into play more often than not i think when you have your timeline detached because we detach that timeline and i have it in a full screen mode it's really helpful to see those in great detail if i want by using that slider and seeing everything at once with all that high level of detail depending on how i want to edit so there is a lot of flexibility in the timeline with some of the tools either located in contextual menus which is the right click menus or in the ribbon itself all right let's talk about a couple things we've talked about making size changes the selection tool we've definitely talked about shifting and moving all the tracks the magnifying glass sorts of things like that all right a couple of really powerful tools with the selection tool that i use often as well i tend to record my introductions to my videos first and then like to share that section out with people to get their feedback well there's a really easy way to do that and that's by leaning on the selection tool so if i click and drag my selection tool let's say only over that intro section so i'm going to end it where i stop talking and i fall off the screen here i can produce just this section of my video without having to render out that whole nine minute presentation so right now i'm only going to render out i don't know 40 seconds or so once i have a selection made with the selection tool i can right click in this area and i can do a few things one i can produce the timeline selection as which will bring up our production wizard where i can produce it as an mp4 i can share it to local drives heck i can even send it up to cloud destinations at this point this is really helpful for testing out different methods of your video different intros different music seeing how an animation plays back on a big screen making those selections and producing that selection as is very helpful as well i can also take a selection with the selection tool no matter the size and i can right click and add that selection directly to my library so if i have an intro sequence that i'm going to repeat or i have an animation there's the visual that wants to be repeated exactly the way it is i can right click on the selection and choose add timeline selection to library and i can add it right in the library it'll group everything together and put it in the library that i want and i can choose its size parameters and everything from there as well speaking of adding things to your library i can also do it without using the selection tool by right clicking on the media so if i wanted to keep this intro right here that's already on my timeline i can right click it and choose add to library which allows me to send just that piece of media to my library because maybe i just want to have it repeatable which is great for consistent video usage i can also do something very unique and specific to camtasia 2020. we included something called templates and we will tell you all about those in other webinars as well as on that list the document that mike shared earlier on that's also in your go to webinar interface but you can convert any piece of media that's on your timeline into a placeholder by right clicking on it and choosing convert to placeholder that allows you to have it as a placeholder with guidance you can write notes in it so that when you come back to the video you can kind of teach yourself and guide yourself as to what you wanted to go in that place or if you share that template or project out with someone else on your team who's getting ready to make a video you can provide guidance by using those placeholders as well mike i actually have fun talking about the timeline so i know my voice is starting to get shot so at this point i'm going to take another quick break for a drink because we're actually getting near end of time and i'd love to visit with you and anyone in the group that maybe has additional questions or something i kind of glossed over or anything associated with the timeline that we haven't hit so far great jason a lot of a lot of good good questions and good comments too um so one question that came up joe was hoping maybe you could touch on marking on the timeline or markers yes yes let's do that thank you for asking that joe so there's a couple of features on the timeline that i don't talk about that often but they are crucial for different types of videos you might be making one is while they're both found underneath this drop down carrot here on the left hand side one is the quizzing timeline which we're not going to talk about quizzing today but the other option you have is the marker timeline so the marker on your timeline creates this little spot at the top with a blue plus button where i can drag it along and click on my timeline and add a marker i can also add markers to individual pieces of media well you're like great jason what's a marker for well i'm glad you asked markers can be used for a couple different reasons one way is to just label sections of your video like i could put a marker here by clicking on it it's called marker one and then it shows the ability to rename the marker in the properties panel i might just call this intro okay so i've added a marker let's add this next marker here we'll call this one section 1 um cleanup or whatever happens to be in the video okay i can add multiple markers throughout my video that allow uh the project to show me exactly where things are happening on the screen so it's a great guide for me or if i want to use any of some of the camtasia interactivity pieces for example you have the ability to add interactive hotspots on your screen where i can make parts of the screen clickable and one of the options of an interactive hotspot is to have your your video jumped to a specific marker so you can have a marker um over here in the properties panel and it'll list all the markers as i add them to the project so if i want to say oh for example i made a video a few years back on teaching people how to utilize google drive for sharing videos and i did it for the desktop version and i did it for the mobile version but i put a marker right at the point of the video where i was going to talk about the mobile version so at the beginning i said hey if you're only going to do this from a mobile device click here and learn how to do it from the mobile device and it skipped the entire section of using the pc or the desktop and went right to the relevant content to them also markers are extremely helpful if you're creating a video where you want to have a table of contents so you can export a video and the markers themselves will create a time stamped table of contents that are also searchable and clickable by using the techsmith smart player as part of the interactive features in camtasia so markers very very powerful on the timeline themselves you can also add markers as i showed to different pieces of media while that marker track is exposed and those markers stay with that content so if i close this marker track up here on the left and i have a marker attached to the screen recording if i move the screen recording anywhere the marker will go with it so i don't lose that functionality i can click this around i can drag it around and the marker stays exactly where it was so if you have something that's specific to a piece of media you have that control as well so great question what else you got mike so we've got a i think people have been paying attention to your your project that you're working on here jason and you have a question um more about the the canvas than the timeline ann was wondering how did you create that white canvas yeah so there is the easiest way to manipulate properties of your canvas you can actually right click on the canvas itself and go to the project settings but i find the easiest way is to go to the drop down menu at the top of the canvas here usually where you see the visual percentage of what's available to be seen on your canvas and you click on that and go to project settings here at the bottom this is what shows your dimensions so we always produce our videos at 720 but we record larger but the option for the color is right here and it's the entirety of the color wheel right you can put in any hex code any rgb code you can even use the eyedropper tool to grab another color if you have themes color themes built into camtasia you can access those as well be aware that if you set your canvas color that is the color for the entirety of that project if you want it white at a certain point in green at another point you'll have to use some sort of shape or style styled call out to change the color itself but the color stays across the entire version of that particular project on the canvas great thank you jason so the the next question we have here is about reusing content and joe was wondering can camtasia record audio to use on future videos for example applause sure uh any audio any media that's on your timeline can be saved in your library to use across multiple future projects for example uh let's see i have narration here at the end let's uh just play this just for a second here click from there all right this narration people would you like to know visit our online teaching resources page and click here on the submit an idea and we'll do our best to get you that content so maybe i don't want to re-record that i already recorded it i made the edits the way i want it's nice and clean and i'm happy with the way it works all i need to do is right click on that media and add that piece of media that recording to my library and i just tell camtasia we'll call it i'll call it human outro so i know what it is maybe i'll spell it without goofing it up there and then i can insert it into any library i want um because you can of course create as many custom libraries as you need in camtasia so for me i'll put it in this hal folder and hit ok and now that library has that human outro and i can reuse that one not only in this video but as many times as i need in future videos as well so right clicking on a piece of media adding that to the library and then naming it as you see fit great so jason we had a few questions about groups and you know specifically tony was wondering when you have a group of annotations can you add behaviors to the group or do you have to add them separately so the answer to that question is yes you can add them individually and you can add them to the group and they would be affected in different ways so let's show what that looks like i'm just going to create a gap here at the beginning of my video let's just white background and let's add a couple of callouts to my screen so we'll add this one this one we'll add this one so three different callouts and we'll add three different behaviors one to each one so as we play those videos play the video back you'll see those come up on the screen and they have their own behaviors associated with them if i group these all together by selecting them right clicking and choosing group if i behi i'll add a behavior that isn't on any of them this drifting one i add that to the group itself so now the group has a behavior so all three of them will come in with that drifting one but each callout itself has its own behavior associated with it so yes you can add it to the individual pieces but yes you can also add it to the group they would just be affected at the same time if you add them together good question they're all good questions but that's a good question there are a lot of good questions jason so sure if you have other things you'd like to show you can go ahead if not we can continue with the with questions sure yeah let's go ahead uh let's go ahead with questions because i think we're at the point where uh people are finding things that they want to discover okay i think uh valencia's question maybe was sparked with the the reusable uh content valencia was hoping that you could show how to create a custom library yes so to create a custom library we would choose the library tab over here on the left hand side of the screen and for the most part most of you will see this library this is the camtasia 2020 library that comes pre-installed on in camtasia this is a great library right it's got a lot of royalty-free high-quality assets in it we've got icon packs available in here we also have animated intros that are customizable animated lower thirds that are customizable some high quality motion backgrounds add a little bit more polish to your videos right off the bat as well as royalty free music tracks and outros however sometimes you want to create a library that's specific to a project you're working on to do this you can use the drop down menu here at the top and you can choose create new library towards the bottom and when you do that you can name the library however you want so we'll call this one deep and then i can either start from a blank state which means it would be completely empty or if i have other libraries in camtasia already or someone has shared a library with me because you can do that as well i can start from uh kind of like a template so if i go to the uh the bicycle workshop one and hit create i actually had content in another library called bicycle workshop that i could start from that position right away where i have a library with content in it instead of a blank slate and then i can move things around in the library i can add folders i can do a lot within the library itself including sharing content directly from it zipping it up deleting it renaming it importing things from my computer right to the folder in the library there's a lot of power underneath your library i can then always uh manage the libraries as well by renaming them deleting them or if someone shares a library with me either on its own or through packages which are new to camtasia 2020 as well i can import them from here all right all right i think we have time for one more question and this is one i think you covered earlier but probably a a best practice to maybe reinforce tony was wondering to edit audio on the timeline would it have to be when he's not using the webcam to edit audio on the timeline would it have to be when i'm not using the webcam not necessarily i think i think the question you're asking tony is if i have webcam and audio together for example at the beginning of my video here i am on screen and i am talking so if we play this back but you end up having multiple email conversations so i have these things grouped together if i were to ungroup this and make a change to the audio here while there's my face on the screen there is a chance that the audio would not match up with the movement of my mouth on the screen so editing audio without webcam is simple i simply make the changes that i want and then line up the audio however i need on my screen recording it's a little trickier when you have your face or your or someone's face on the screen because you don't want it to seem out of sync it's possible but if you're deleting audio from something like a webcam video it's best practice to take the video with it as well to make a cut or if it's a series of cuts or a series of edits that you think you need to make and you don't want to use say a jump cut style of editing maybe it's time to do a reshoot but that's a that'll come with time and experience uh more often than not uh i'm not doing a lot of webcam work i'll just do voiceover work but definitely experiment because you have all those capabilities within camtasia it's worth trying out especially for the short introductory videos especially if there's educators out there that are getting ready to create content online for the fall actually that's a good it's a terrible but great segue mic that i wanted to show people and this is included in the document that is in the handout that mike mentioned earlier there's actually a website that we have that we created here at techsmith that we're constantly updating called the resources education page these videos are made on the regular where we're addressing concerns and desired learning states for people that are going into more of a remote learning a remote teaching section as well as doing it remotely for work all of them center around camtasia and something so if you want to make your first how-to video we've got a video on that if you want to learn how to do a check-in video we've got content on that so this web page is also included in that document and we are updating it on a regular basis so i just wanted to kind of call attention to that that we have resources available not to mention all of our tutorials all of our upcoming webinars but i'll hand it back to you mike because i think you're going to close this up talking about that but one more question this one comes up often i'll take it ken's asking what microphone am i using in my videos so the microphone that i have on on my desk right now i'll just turn on my webcam here for just a second uh this is the camera i'm looking at the wrong camera so the microphone i'm using is this one it's the audio technica 2020 usb been using it for years this works well for me i have it set up the way i want but the best bet uh best microphone that you can use is the one that you have available to you if you have a usb based microphone that's great if you don't use the one that you have available don't let perfection be the enemy have done i always want to say that so mike let me hand it back to you as we wrap up our webinar today

Channel: TechSmith

Views: 15,172

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

Id: 82MGln4uhkQ

Length: 52min 37sec (3157 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020