The Beginner's Guide to Camtasia

this is the beginner's guide to Camtasia I get asked all the time what software I use to make the videos that I post to my channel and the answer is Camtasia you can get a free trial or you can buy it to get access to Camtasia so you can use it and if you're interested in either the free trial or actually paying for the software look in the description below and I have some links for you but the focus of this video is how to actually use it to create videos of your own so let's say I would like to create a video showing viewers how to access my YouTube playlists and get the most benefit from them I would just start up Camtasia I have it pinned here on my taskbar and I get a pop up as it loads while this is loading let me just say that I'm demonstrating this on a Windows computer if you're a Mac user the experience is similar but if there's enough interest in seeing a Mac tutorial for Camtasia I will make another tutorial focusing on the Mac Camtasia has finished loading at this point I get this pop-up and I like this little pop-up if you don't you can uncheck this box and it will skip this step entirely but I like it and at this point I just click new project it looks like it's asking me to update I'm gonna say no at this time and it loads up for us the Camtasia interface let's look quickly at the different sections in Camtasia across the bottom we have the timeline and as you develop your video you'll be able to see the duration of the video here on the timeline and you'll be able to make changes to it at the center of the screen I have a preview window where I'll be able to see a preview of the actual video that I'm creating on the right we have properties and you can hide these properties just by clicking the properties button and that way your preview window gets bigger but the properties panel is very useful and very important and I'll illustrate that later after I've made a recording on the left side we have some tabs basically that give us a bunch of different tools with the media tab selected you get the media bin and you can import media to be used inside your project so I could click import Media and then select a folder let's say music that I could add into my project or pictures maybe I want to use some of these pictures in my project I could select them click open and I could also add other kinds of media like videos now those are pre-existing videos if you just want to record a new video I'll show you how to do that in just a minute we also have a library and this is very useful you can pull in folders full of icons intros music tracks outros all sorts of different elements that you can add to your own projects these can be very powerful and very time-saving for you so the library is a particularly useful tool inside of Camtasia if there's a lot of interest in this video that I'm making right now I may make a future video that focuses more on the library we also have some other tools here at the left but to focus in on the most useful especially in this beginners guide I want to focus on annotations these are things that you can do to your video you can add shapes you can add arrows call-outs you can blur and highlight different parts of your video you can draw on your video and you can add keystrokes to your video annotations are very important there's also transitions to go from one clip in your video to another clip and then we have animations that are very important and if I click more there's even more options here as well particularly important at least to me are these visual effects there's one more section of the interface to be aware of and that is the menu system across the top we have file and you'll find save save as you'll find export new recording import those are all pretty important options that you'll find in the file menu also important is the share menu you can see the different options for sharing your finished video you can also get many of these here by clicking the share button okay we're not going to be able to focus on all of that in this beginners guide but if there's a lot of interest in this video I'd be happy to make additional videos in the future so at this point before I begin recording there's couple of things that are important to check and I recommend that you do the same the first is to right-click on the preview of your video here right-click on it and go to the project settings and here you'll want to double check the canvas dimensions you want to make sure the dimensions are correct for you and for the viewer in most cases you're going to want HD quality and that specifically is 1920 by 1080 so the width 1920 the height 1080 and that won't necessarily be the default when you use Camtasia for the first time so watch out for that I also recommend the frame rate to be at 30 frames per second at least to start with and I'm gonna leave this checked but you don't necessarily have to now if you want 4k capability you can change the canvas dimensions you can see that Camtasia is capable now of 4k UHD quality so I could switch to that it would likely lead to much bigger file sizes and for my purposes 1080p is perfect so I'll stick with that I'll click apply and now I'm ready to begin my recording here we have in the upper left corner a big red record button and you can just go ahead and click that or you can click file new recording either way it should minimize Camtasia and in the lower right corner a little window will pop up with some important options the first thing I like to check here is to make sure that the microphone is on and that the correct microphone is selected this is the best microphone that I'm aware of the blue Yeti if you're interested in learning more about it check out the link in the description below but it's a great microphone so I want to make sure that it's selected next I need to decide if I want to activate my webcam if I do I can just click that button to turn on the webcam that way it will record my screen and also my face as I'm talking in this case that's not important to me it's not necessary so I'll turn it off just to the left of that I can double-check the dimensions of my recording you can see it says recording area and if I click just to the right of this screen on button there's a tiny button with an arrow on it and if I click there I can make sure that I'm recording the full screen so even though the canvas is set to 1080 or 1920 by 1080 what portion of the screen that I'm recording this on do I want to record if I just do 1080p look it will only get this much of the screen that's not going to be enough for me so I want to make sure that it's set to full screen but you may not want to you might want just a portion of the screen next I need to decide if I want to record the system audio let's say I'm recording myself playing video games if I want the music and sound effects from the game to be recorded I have to turn this on now there's a downside to turning on system audio using this button there's also a downside to turning on your webcam in both cases you'll end up doing quite a bit more work in the editing phase okay I'm ready to record I'll just click the record button and I get a countdown three two one and it's now live and I can just begin talking and moving my mouse and everything that I say and everything that I do on this computer whether it's moving the mouse or typing or going to different web pages all of it is recorded and it's not just for webpages it's anything on this screen will be recorded in this video I'll show you how to access my playlists first go to youtube.com and search for technology for teachers and students while you're at it click subscribe then click the link for the channel it should take you to the channel home page browse down and you'll see a bunch of playlists if you want to see all of the playlists click this playlist button and then choose the playlist that you're most interested in here's one on Microsoft Excel and it takes you to the first video in the list and on the right side you'll see the full playlist you can jump to ok let's say that that's what I wanted to record when I'm ready to stop my Camtasia recording all I have to do is go down to this icon on the taskbar and click on it and I get a pop-up again that list of tools appears it tells me the duration of my video so far there's an option to delete it and just start over I could pause it and this is useful let's say there's a dog barking outside your window and you don't want that sound to be in your recording you can just pause it and then when the dogs quiet again or gone you can click resume and start talking again in your video but when you're truly done you just click this button click stop and your new recording will be added right into your project if you recall before I did any recording I opened a project a new project I added a few images to the media bin but then I clicked record to get this this screen recording and it was added automatically to the timeline now with the timeline selected you'll notice here at the right that my properties now have a bunch of tools and options available and so that's why I say this properties button is pretty important you can turn it off and on but just make sure you do check it out at some point while you're creating your video a couple of changes I like to make here in the properties I like to select my video here on the timeline and go up to the mouse pointer or cursor properties and change the scale of the mouse so that it's bigger I like to go to 205 around that size that way when people are watching the video the mouse pointer is a lot bigger than it otherwise would be it makes it easier to see another change I like to make is sometimes when I'm recording on a small computer with a small screen you can see what happens the canvas is HD dimensions but the computer screen isn't quite HD in its dimensions and so what I like to do is hold the shift key on the keyboard and then grab this little tiny handle that's right there it looks like a little bubble with the shift key held I can click and drag to stretch the recording size to match the canvas and that usually looks a lot better it fills the screen completely now as I recorded this recording I did make some mistakes I stuttered a few times I repeated myself and as you can see there's some dead air when I wasn't talking and I would like to remove those errors I'd like to get rid of the dead air so that's what we need to do next is make some edit to the video for me to really be able to do this well I'm gonna want to zoom in a little bit you can see right now on the timeline I'm zoomed in maybe at 30% 40% for me when I'm editing I like to be at about 95 percent probably and I like to go to the very beginning of the recording and the recording on the timeline really should be right up to the far left edge and so I've fixed that I had moved it accidentally but now it's right up against the far left edge like it should be and now I just press play and begin editing the video from the beginning now if you get sick of pressing play you can use spacebar instead so tapping spacebar it starts playing and then if I tap it again it stops playing so the beginning part of this video I don't really want to keep that there's a couple of ways I could trim out this section of audio and get rid of it and in fact I want to get rid of this as well on a Windows computer one of the best ways to make these edits is to use this playhead the playhead is exactly that wherever it is when you click play that's where the sound will begin so if I want to hear this part here I put the playhead there I click play and then I can hear it well on either side of the playhead we have two different handles one that's green and I can click and drag on the green one to go as far back as I want to and then one that's red and I can click and drag on the red to go as far to the right as I want to that highlights part of the video clip and now that section of the video is ready to be deleted I could right click and select ripple delete or I could use the shortcut ctrl backspace let's try that I hold ctrl on the keyboard tap backspace and it performed a ripple delete having said that if you just hold ctrl and tap X on a Windows computer it does basically the same thing control X for cut now I can press spacebar to resume so I can see that I need to delete even more I probably need to delete right up to this point here so I could perform the same kind of task I could can drag to move the handle to the left of the playhead and then hold ctrl and tap X or backspace I could do the same exact thing as before or I could click on the far left edge of this video clip you can see my mouse pointer changed it changed into a two-sided arrow and I can click and drag to basically do the same kind of thing I've cut out the section of the clip that I don't want to use now I can just click and drag to pull that over now the reason I have to click and drag is because I didn't do the ripple delete and that's the advantage of using the playhead like this and the handles and then using this ripple delete option it deletes but it also pulls the two clips together again okay so at this point I would go through and cut out any mistakes that I've made let's say that's a mistake control X or ctrl backspace I could get rid of all of this dead air by selecting all of this control X and I would just work my way through the video you can see here at the right the total length of the video is a minute and 49 seconds but I can skip back and skip ahead using either the playhead or if I need to do it more quickly I can use this slider here to jump very quickly back to the beginning or to the end of my video let's look quickly at a few of the tools that we have here at the left I like to start my videos with a transition so I'll click on transition I like to use fade or fade through black but there's lots of other options as well I'm gonna go with glow this time and I just click and drag and drop it on my media clip and often that will add the transition to the beginning of the clip and also to the end of the clip in this case it didn't do that it usually does that if you click and drag not to the very beginning only but to the center of the clip now that I've dropped it near the center of the clip you can see that the transition was applied at the end and also at the beginning and I can tell because of this turquoise overlay that's added on top of my media clip let's look now at animations there are lots of ways you can do animations in Camtasia and I'll save a lot of that for another video but let me just show you one of the best animations if I click here on animations I can go to the animations tab and there's all sorts of wonderful animations scale-down scale-up smartFocus but my favorite of all is custom if I click and drag and drop custom right on to the media clip on the timeline I can then adjust it to change the duration of the animation if I want it to be a long animation I go like this if I want it to be a short animation I go like this to make it smaller and then all I have to do is click either on the beginning of the animation or the end of the animation you can see the two circles one at the beginning one at the end and all I have to do is determine what do I want the screen or this clip because that's where I dragged the animation where do I want it to be what do I want it to look like at this point of the animation well I want it to look just as it does now but what about at the end of the animation well I would like to zoom in on my playlist to do that I may have to shrink the preview screen the way I'm doing that is I'm using my mouse I'm just putting my mouse on top of the preview screen and I'm using the scroll wheel on the mouse to scroll down and make the preview smaller now the reason I had to do that was so that I could get the corner there's a little handle in the corner and I'm gonna click and drag to zoom in on my playlist so that's what I want to zoom in on just that right there let's see if it worked all I have to do is move the playhead back in front of the animation click play and you could see that it worked beautifully if I stretch out this animation a lot more it will be a longer animation but it will go more slowly and so you can see this better I'm gonna zoom back in using the scroll wheel I'll press play so that's a great tool to use as you're editing your videos there's so much more that I could teach you about Camtasia but for this beginners guide I'm gonna stop here and just show you quickly how to share your finished video let's go here to the share button and you can try sharing directly to YouTube or to Vimeo or screencast com but sometimes those don't work the way you would expect or even at all so it's important to know the most basic way to save and that is to a local file so I just clicked local file here i can change my custom production settings if i want to and i can go down here to add edit preset to see what those settings are or i could switch to let's say mp4 only up to 1080p that's a great setting to choose and then I could click next give it a title notice where it's being saved and I can change that if I want to and then click finish at this point it's going to render my project and turn it into a full video that I can access and share with people I can upload it to youtube or anywhere else and it's gonna save it in that location that I told it to save to I'm gonna cancel that out because I don't really want the video and I'll X out of this but that's how you create a screen recording using Camtasia now just so you know if you recall I said that if you add a webcam recording or audio from the computer that it makes your editing more difficult the reason why is because you end up with more than one track you'll have two tracks three tracks that you'll have to edit so that's something to be aware of also I want you to know if I'm not done editing this I should go to file save as save it where I want to save it and give it a name and then I'll be able to come back and edit it more later so I've named it and I'll click Save so now this is a Camtasia project and it's been saved so I can come back and pull it up at any time just by going to file open project and finding the project and I could just keep editing it until it's ready to be shared and save to a local file like I did earlier thanks for watching this tutorial I hope you found it to be helpful if you did please like follow and subscribe when you do subscribe please click the bell next to the subscribe button that way you'll be notified whenever I post another video and if you'd like to support my channel you can do that through my patreon account you'll see a link to that in the description below along with some links to be able to get Camtasia and also information about the microphone that I use it's a great microphone

Channel: Technology for Teachers and Students

Views: 41,997

Keywords: camtasia, camtasia tutorial, using camtasia, how to use camtasia, getting started with camtasia, tutorial for camtasia, video editing software, how to edit video, how to create youtube videos, editing youtube videos, youtube video editing, how to edit youtube videos, screencasting tools, how to record your screen, camtasia screen recording, camtasia screenrecording

Id: 0EeSV-LIKtw

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020