How to Make Interactive Videos with Camtasia

most videos are passive a viewer just sits back and watches whatever the video creator put together but with Camtasia you can make interactive videos where users can click on different parts in your video and have something happen a simple example would be placing your website at the end of a video and when users click the video a new tab opens in their browser and takes them to your site a more complex example would be if you created a nonlinear video in other words viewers could click to have the video go to another part of your video viewers could move forward if they wanted to skip something they already knew or they could review part of the video that they needed to hear a second time in this video we'll look at how to add interactive hotspots configure the hotspots produce your video and where to host your video there are two ways to add interactive hotspots you can add a hotspot to a specific clip like a text box image or video or you can add a hotspot as an invisible annotation that you can resize to any rectangle you want before adding a hotspot it's important to note that you want your hotspot on a top track if the hotspot is below another track then it won't work as expected to add a hotspot to an entire clip like a text box click the visual effects tool from the tools menu or press L drag the interactive hotspot effect from the tools panel to your clip you should see the interactive hotspot effect at the bottom of your clip and in your properties panel to add a hotspot as an invisible object on your video click the annotations tool or press N and click the special tab which looks like a drop drag the interactive hotspot tool to the canvas for the hotspot annotation you can resize the rectangle to be larger or smaller click and drag the resizing handles around the hotspot and the hot spot will resize hot spots applied to a clip cannot be resized they stay the size of the clip select the hotspot annotation or the clip with the hotspot effect and look for the first tab in the properties pane at the bottom you'll see the interactive hotspot effect by default it has pause at end and click to continue selected this just means that the video will pause when it gets to the end of the clip or annotation the video will continue playing when the viewer clicks the hotspot URL lets you go to any website you enter you probably want to leave open a new browser tab selected so viewers can easily bounce between your video and the new website marker lets viewers go to a specific place in the video for example you can add a marker at the beginning of your video when you get to this point in the video you can give the viewers an option to click the hotspot to restart the video time lets you specify a place in your video without having a marker enter the timestamp in minutes seconds frames you could also place your playhead on the timeline when you click the current position button it'll enter the timestamp of your playhead last you can click the test button to see what happens when the viewer clicks the hotspot the most important thing to understand with interactive video is that it requires separate video hosting interactive video isn't possible on YouTube or with a standard mp4 file instead you need to create your video and include additional files that provide the interactivity when it comes time to produce or share your video you'll need to choose an option that includes the smart player like mp4 with smart player up to 1080p producing your video with the smart player will create several additional files produce everything within a folder to keep it organized if you know you want the size of the video to be a specific width choose custom production when you get to the smart player options page be sure that produce with controller is checked when you go to the size tab you can choose how wide you want the video to appear this is important so your video fits on your page instead of producing video files you can choose the screencast.com option from the share menu screencast comm is owned by TechSmith the acres of Camtasia screencast-o-matic ount you can sign up for free or paid account at you guessed it screencast com once you have your username and password enter those in the screencast comm production wizard in Camtasia if you're hosting your own website or if your customer is hosting their own website then you have a couple of options for adding the video the first option is the easier of the two you can just upload the files and directories to Amazon s3 if it's a public video set the read permissions for everybody after uploading it all you need is the link to the HTML file provide viewers with that link and they should be able to watch the video and interact with it the second option requires a webmaster to embed the smart player on their site sites are different in the way they host files most webmasters have to copy the files to their site and set the permissions so the right people can view the video they might also have to edit the HTML code to point to the file locations and set the right permissions you can learn more about hot spots from the Camtasia mastery 20:19 book or course you can find them both at kam mastery com

Channel: Cam Answers

Views: 8,452

Keywords: camtasia, camtasia studio, screencast, eugohnor, camtasia 2019, cam answers, camanswers

Id: _JgM3OlCM0U

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019