Hello, this is Cristi from Graphicious. Thanks for joining me. In today's Camtasia tutorial, I'm going to
show you a way to create a multi video grid. You know, those video grids that have become
very popular in lockdowns and you know, during the pandemic they've gone from creating concerts
or bands, you know, playing music or choir singing in sync over Zoom or over, you know,
all over the internet, really, everybody recording themselves, individually, and then putting
it all together into a grid of like a wall of sound, wall of songs, wall of people singing. It is possible to do this in Camtasia, so
I'm going to show you a few tricks to make your job easier and also to make the editing
more performant and easier to work with. So I'm going to use Camtasia 2021. I think this works also in 2020 and some previous
versions, but it's actually better in 2021 because it has some features that help you
edit faster. And if you have a lot of videos, I don't know
how many videos you have. Someone said, you know, I maybe have 30 or
40 video streams. I don't actually advise you to try that in
Camtasia, because you could have maybe some performance issues, but if you do want to
do it, if you want to try it, I'm going to show you a way to do it. I'm only going to use 12 videos and they're
not actually of the same you know, song or same band. It's just a bunch of videos I've found. So let's have a look how to do this, and how
to end up with a nice montage at the end, with all the videos playing simultaneously,
you know, arranged on the screen altogether. If you look here, I have a folder with some
videos that I saved from Pexels and they really are not related in any way. They have different lengths and different
orientation. I specifically chose some videos that are
portrait, some that are landscape, so that I just want to show you how to do this, so
they all work together. We're going to just start by importing these
into Camtasia, select all of them and just drag them to the media bin. I'm not going to put them in the timeline
first. I'm going to put them in the media bin because,
before I actually start editing, I want to prepare some things. So let's go back to Camtasia now and you see
them all in here. You can change the thumbnail here to see smaller
thumbnails, if you want, or you can arrange them by different criteria. It doesn't really matter, they're all video
clips. And they are all different lengths. So just so you know, this is going to be just
as a proof of concept. I'm not actually going to assemble a concert
here. So what we want to do first is we want to
decide how many videos have to go into my montage. So the first thing is we have 12 clips that
means I can arrange them, provided I want to include all of them, I want to arrange
them maybe in a four by three grid, or I don't know, two by six would be too wide, I suppose,
because you know, you have a 16:9 screen. So I think four by three works just fine. How do you arrange these because are different
orientations, different aspect ratios, maybe? I don't know how your videos come in. So you're going to have to prepare them in
such a way that they go nicely together in their own slot. To do that, we will build a grid. So let me show you how to do a grid. If you go to the canvas, make sure, first
of all, that you have your project settings in order. So my project is going to be 1080p, 1920 by
1080, at 30 frames per second. So that's the size of my project, I'm going
to work with. Click apply and leave that alone for now and
to work better, I've decided to do a four by three grid, which means I'm going to have
four videos on a row. And I'm going to have three on a column, so
12 clips total. Let me create the grid. That's the first step we want to do. We want to create a grid to help us arrange
the videos. So I've decided I'm going to do a four by
three. I'm just going to go to annotations and I'm
going to use one of these annotations from the main arrows and lines tab. It's going to be just a simple line. And I'm just going to drag that to my canvas. So let's build a grid. So I'm going to just drag the edges of this. Notice you have the snapping turned on, you
see that line here, that's helping us kind of arrange things. So that means my line is in the middle of
the canvas. Notice if I go up and down, it's not horizontal. So when it snaps, it shows you that yellow
line. If you don't have the snapping enabled, you
can go to the view menu, and you can turn on enable canvas snapping. So there you go. This is my one grid line, I've divided my
screen into two. Actually what I want to do is divide it into
three, right? So I'm just going to copy this before I copy
it. I'm going to make it white. So I'm just going to go to the colours here. Just put that to white and I'm going to put
the thickness up to about 20 pixels. So I have a big thick white line to work with,
I'm going to show you what to do with this later, because that's going to be actually
quite helpful in more than one way. So I have created this line. I'm just going to put it up in the sort of
a one-third, copy and paste. I'm going to make a copy of this and pull
it down a bit here, so I have about, I'm just eyeballing this now, if you want to calculate
automatically and make sure that you have exact, exact sizes, you can go in here into
the properties and you can see the position X and Y. So you can actually play with this and arrange
it perfectly in place. I'm not going to do this. I'm just going to eyeball it. So here we go. These are my two lines. Now I'm going to make a copy of this, CTRL
+ C, CTRL + V. This is my third line. I'm actually going to make this vertical,
so I'm going to use the snapping line on the middle of my canvas here to make that perfectly
vertical. So here we go, the top, the bottom, the top
bit, okay. And again, I said, I want to do four horizontally,
so this is going to be okay in the middle. CTRL + C, CTRL + V to duplicate, and put it
in the middle, kind of here, and another copy, CTRL + C, CTRL + V and here. So this is roughly my grid of where the videos
are going to come in. Now, what are we going to do with this grid? This grid is going to help us align the videos
and we know exactly which one goes where, but at the moment, I don't want to actually
touch this grid because I'm happy with it right now. It's going to serve as a guide. So what I want to do is, I want to select
everything, just select everything, make them long so that it, you know, depending on the
length of your video, you may want to turn this into, I don't know, five minutes long
or whatever, but I'm going to just keep it two minutes. I'm not actually going to make a long video. I'm just going to show you a proof of concept. So, select all of them, and CTRL + G to group
them together. So this is my grid right now is inside of
a group. So what I want to do is because I don't want
to by accident, I don't want to move this grid around and mess up my grid. What I can do is I can lock this grid. I can lock the track where the grid is, but
before I do that, because I want to use it as a guide, I want to move it at the top. So I'm just going to drag the header off the
track here. Here we go. I'm just going to move it up. Double click on the track header to rename
it. Let's call this one GRID like that. So I know this is my grid track and also,
in this group. I don't want it to be actually so visible
like this. I want it to be kind of faded out. So what you can do is you go to the clip properties
on the top, right here, and I'm going to turn the opacity down about halfway, maybe like
this. So I can still see it, but it's not bothering
me with my videos. The reason I put it at the top is because
when I put the videos at the bottom. So I have four tracks. You notice I've got four tracks left, they're
empty. So now my grid is on the top and to prevent
my grid from being edited and from being moved by accident, I can lock this track. So this is one way to do it. Just lock the track, so now I cannot actually
do anything with this grid anymore. It's still is visible, but I can't touch it. And the nice thing is, this grid actually
works for helping us arrange the videos and the snapping still works. So even though the grid is locked, I can still
snap to it. So here is the nice part. Here's where we get really helpful. Go back to the media bin and we have the videos,
you know, I'm not going to sweat which video goes where. I'm just going to put them all in here in
order. Right? I'm going to just grab the first video and
place it on track 1. And you see that the video actually fills
the whole screen because it's a 16 by nine video. I can move my canvas space down to have more
room. The way to do it is of course, if you have
a recording that comes from multiple sources, I'm imagining you're maybe trying to arrange
like a song or something. Assuming that the length of the song is the
same for all of the singers or the players, then all of the tracks will have to be aligned,
at the same time. So they start and end and synchronized, right? So I'm not going to worry about that right
now. My videos are actually different lengths and
different frame rates and everything. So I'm not worried about that, but you want
to be worried about that. You know what I mean? Before you start arranging stuff, you want
to make sure that your videos are synchronized. So what you can do is you can drag the first
group. I advise you to do them in groups of two or
three or four and just arrange them in rows. So I'm just going to grab four videos here. They're all on the timeline right now. Of course they're all on top of each other. But notice, because my grid is at the top. I can still see the grid and I know exactly
where everything goes. Right, this is another tip: you just put your
videos, you synchronize them and you arrange them in groups. Right? So we have four tracks with the first four
clips on the top row. Let's suppose they're going to go on the top
row. So what I have to do now is just take each
clip and put it in place. Now, of course, there are different sizes,
different aspect ratios. So what you want to do is, you want to resize
them, of course. So I'm just gonna grab this one and this is
going to be the fourth one. This is at the top. Number four, you can double click the track
actually and give it names and also you can resize them. So I'm just going to select this clip and
resize it to fit my singer in the appropriate spot on the grid. You can zoom in and out if you need precision. But of course this clip, you notice, it is
a portrait clip. You could go fancy and have one clip, kind
of take two slots. That's up to you. It's creative freedom, but I don't want to
do this, I want to just put them all inside of each each one's kind of grid spot. This resizing is a one tip here for you. When you have multiple singers kind of aligned
in a grid like that, what you want to try and do is before, really in the recording
phase, you want to make sure that you tell them, you know, kind of stay at the same distance
from the camera so that your head is the same as everyone's size of the head. You don't want someone just barely visible
and someone with a huge head that fills the whole grid. Because then you're going to have to, you
know, it's not going to look nice. So one thing to do is if you have videos like
this that are different sizes you know, people have used their phone or something, and they're
kind of far away from the camera, that is okay, because you can still resize this clip. Notice here, I'm resizing this. And the idea is that they're going to be singing
in the same position all the time. So it's quite safe for you to just place the
video somewhere and not have to move it. We can cover that too. If you need to move it, we'll talk about that
later. But, I'm placing my video in here. And what am I going to do with the rest of
the video? Because it's overlapping other stuff. Well, in Camtasia, you can go to crop mode. You notice here on the top of the toolbar,
you have crop, or you can hold down the alt key. When you hold down the ALT key, you're no
longer resizing a clip. You hold down the ALT key and you're cropping
it. So now I'm going to crop this video, so the
rest of it is not visible. So watch this. When I approach the grid, it just snaps into
place. Isn't that cool? So you're snapping into place on the grid. So although the grid is locked, you're still
snapping to it. In Camtasia, you can hold down the SPACE key
and kind of pan around on your canvas, you can zoom in. Use the mouse wheel, zoom in, pan around again,
hold the ALT key and just drag down to resize or crop your video. If you need to, you can arrange it at the
middle here somehow like that. So you're seeing it very nice. Don't worry about the edges though, because
I'm going to show you at the end, a very cool trick to fix all of them at once. So this is my video of person number four,
let's zoom out again, and take care of the second clip or third one, cause we're working
from the top to the bottom. Again, resize this one, like this, fit the
person in the right place on the grid, like that. Feel free to zoom in if you need to. Hold down the ALT key and just crop everything
in place. You know, help yourself to the snapping, which
is really, really cool and helpful. So that grid is really saving me a lot of
time. Okay. Zooming out a bit again, take the third one. Just resize it again. And now this is one tricky one because the
head is quite large here. So this is up to you. If you want to zoom out or zoom in, if you
don't have enough video to go to, to use, just use whatever you have vertically like
this. And, you know, place the head sort of in the
middle and then use the ALT key to crop the rest of the video. One cool tip is if the person in the video
is moving, so let's suppose that she's like, you know, kind of a minute in one place and
then kind of slides sideways or something, you can still tweak each one of them with
animation because in Camtasia, animations also animate the resizing of the clip, but
also the cropping. So you can animate the cropping. So you can shift the video inside of that
window without a problem, the same way you can do this with, with alpha, with the visual
effect that was added in 2021 using a shape matte, which is found in the visual effects. You got media matte, so you can make these
little squares and just place them on top of your video, and they will just crop that
video in place and then you can move it inside. So there's more ways to do this. I like to use the cropping, because that means
I don't have to actually use another element on top of my video, occupy another track and
all of that. So I like the cropping. Okay. Let's move on to the last video in the grid. So that's the fourth one down there. Resize that one again. Okay. Like that. I'm happy with the size, zoom in again, use
the ALT key and just crop everything in place like this. Here we go. So I have already arranged four clips on my
grid. Now, okay. If you have much more clips than me, which
I have, I have 12 here. Someone said they may have 40. That's five by eight grid, maybe. Then that might be a job that requires more
time. But if I wasn't spending time explaining this,
I probably would have been done with this grid by now. So before I continue, I want to tell you about
this feature that's very helpful in Camtasia 2021, which is proxy video, because look what
happens here. Even with these four clips only, if I try
and play them, they're actually just not playing at all. They're just stuttering because my computer,
although I have an SSD drive, plenty of memory, Camtasia really doesn't cope with so much
video streams. Some of these are 60 frame per second, and
it just cannot decode so many. Plus I have eight more to put on there. What I advise is, if you're using Camtasia
2021, before you even start working with this, go to your media bin, right. And select all of the videos and create proxies
with them. Proxy video is a new feature that was introduced
just in Camtasia 2021. It's been around in a lot of software for
years, but Camtasia has just introduced it. It's not perfect. It doesn't allow you to specify the resolution
of the proxies, but it really doesn't matter because you're just playing here with videos. You're just seeing a tiny, tiny bit of them. And when you're rendering your project, finally,
when you're finished and you're rendering it, you know, it does render with the full
resolution video. So you're not affected by the proxies in the
final output file. But during editing, this is, this is crazy. Look, if I'm scrubbing my timeline, these
videos are hardly moving. I can't even see what's going on. So this might make your job of synchronizing
the videos very difficult, because you know, you can't see them in real time. So just select all the videos in the media
bin like this, and just right click on them and say, proxy video, create proxy video. This is going to take a few seconds, and then
what is going to do is Camtasia just generates some low resolution videos that are optimized
for editing and playback, and they are very fast and it helps you edit things very fast,
but at the end, it just exports the full resolution one. So you see the ones that have already been
generated proxies for. You see this orange kind of dot on the thumbnail. That means that that video has a proxy video
and Camtasia just replaced those in your timeline. So watch what happens when this is done, generating
the proxies, here we go. So the proxies have been generated and now
look, I'm scrubbing my timeline. You see how smooth these four videos are moving
here. I can scrub back and forward, I can exactly
see what's going on. If I play them, they're all playing, you know,
at the normal speed. So this is great. So with that in mind, I've made the proxy
now for all of them, I can continue to do it. I'm not going to have you watch this, I'm
going to speed this up, but I'm just going to arrange all of them in my grid here so
that I have the final project ready to see at the end. So I've arranged all the videos on my grid. They're all looking nice. And you may have seen that I've actually grouped
them together four by four on each row. So it's very nice to stay organized because
then you can easily find each clip where it is and what's happening. And also you can actually rename the group. So when you group something, you just right
click on the group and say Rename group. Let's call it top row, although it's at the
bottom, you can move it up to the top, if you want like this, then you've got right
click again and middle row. And then finally the bottom row. I think that's the second one. Rename group, bottom row. So this helps you, if your videos are in the
group, then it helps you kind of easily move them around, swap them, put them on top of
the other ones and so on. And because I still have the proxies on my
videos, watch how smooth the playback is with four 12 clips at the same time, they're playing
very nicely. Now, of course, it really depends on your
system, I suppose, and the speed of your disks, but just so you know, these clips are actually
on a secondary drive, which is not an SSD, but it's a spinning disk via USB. So you can still see that the proxies are
actually created in the temporary folder on your main drive. So if that's an SSD drive, that's going to
be quite fast. So look, I'm scrubbing. And all the videos are playing, you know,
in real time or as fast as I'm scrubbing, they're fine. So, you know, they're playing now. Just make sure that they're looking good. Finally, I'm ready to render this, you know,
may do other stuff, like, you know, put some titles in there, put them in and out and whatever,
or you may want to animate them and make the people kind of turn up when they actually
start singing or playing. So that is up to you again, creative freedom. So what I'm doing now is I have them all arranged,
they're all in a grid. They do have different lengths. So just, you know, don't worry about that
anymore. Some people say, okay, well I've put them
all in a grid, but I would like the borders or the edges to be nice and tidy. Well, we will make use of our grid again. I'm just going to go to the grid layer and,
or track and unlock the grid. So you see my grid now is here. I'm just clicking on this. And one feature that was added in Camtasia
2021 is, when you group some elements together, if they have some customizable properties,
like text fields, line widths and colors and fonts and all those things, then they become
available in this group here on the right, in the properties panel. So you can switch to this quick properties
panel by selecting the group. You're going to see them all in here. So this is five lines in my grid are all here. Before I change those, I go back to the clip
one, which is a clip properties of my group, and just turn the opacity up again. So there you go. I have a nice grid, borders that's covering
my videos and it puts them all nice in place. You can of course customize this, so if you
go back to the quick properties, let's suppose maybe I want the lines to be thicker. All I have to do is just change these values
in here. Let's say, I don't know, 10 pixels all the
way. Right? And there you go. The lines are thinner now and the videos are
still in place. And also what I can do is if I don't want
to have white borders, I want to have black borders. Maybe just go and change the color for each
one of them. Just drag it here. And, let me save it to my colors, select it,
click, select, click, select. This is another feature by the way, in Camtasia
2021, where you can customize a color and save it to my colors, and that color is going
to be available in all of your projects, not just the current project. So there you go. I've got a palette here of my favorite colors
I can use. So there you have it. I've just turned my grid black, like this,
it still plays, it's still working fine. So now I'm ready to export my video. Well, `before you do, just, don't forget to
save often when you do this, you know, save often. Also, before you save, make sure you have
enough hard drive space on your main drive, because I've noticed that when Camtasia doesn't
have enough disc space, it usually continues rendering, but it generates a corrupted video
file, or it cannot actually finish the file or it's missing frames, or it cuts off at
some point. So just make sure you have enough disk space
for Camtasia to work with. So now let's see how long it takes for this
to actually render. What I'm going to do is though I'm going to
zoom out on my timeline and I'm going to just render the part of my video that I actually
have video for everything. Notice one of the clips ends right here. So you know what I'm going to cut everything
and just render that part until this point here. So just like four seconds. I'm sorry about this. I could make that video longer, but just to
prove I'm just going to shift and drag and just remove all the empty tracks, like so,
and just delete everything else. So now my project really just has a few seconds
with clips playing for four seconds and I'm going to render this. I want to see how long it takes for me to
render this with 12 video clips in a grid. So I'm going to just go to the export and
choose local file, and custom production. I'm going to use a simple video settings at
the 75% quality is pretty much the quality where you're not getting any more benefits
from quality versus file size. So 75 is what I usually use, 30 frames or
60 frames, depending on your source clips, click next and then choose a file name and
save that project. I'm just going to save it to my working folder
and I'm just going to let it export it. Let's see. So here we go. It's taken about two minutes to render that
video. Let's see the result playing. So the video is here, video grid, 17 megabytes. So here we go. Let's play it. Perfect. Everything is smooth. So for about four seconds, it took about two
minutes. So your results may vary significantly. So make sure you have enough disk space and
patience. So this was my tutorial. I hope it was useful and gives you an idea
of how to do this. Of course, you probably need a very powerful
machine to do this and plenty of disk space and patience, I suppose, but this is one way
to do it. That grid is certainly very helpful to help
you snap align, arrange, plan everything ahead and then use it as a border at the end. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions about this one or
Camtasia in general, let me know. I'm looking for ideas for videos. If you haven't subscribed to my channel, feel
free to subscribe and see you next time.
