In this video I'm going to show you 10 of my favorite time saving devices when working with
Camtasia if you're an intermediate user and you're looking to push your skills then this video is
really going to help you because it's going to help you to understand quicker ways of working
I've been working with Camtasia since Camtasia 6 probably something like 15 16 years ago now and
I am actually a recommended trainer for Camtasia really hope you like the video and as if you do
please like it please share it please comment on it I'd love to know if you've got any other
tricks that you use to save time and of course join me on my YouTube channel let's get started
just before I start with the first trick if you don't know Camtasia that well and you want to
learn more about the Camtasia as a general tool there's an introductory video on the
screen now that you can click on otherwise we're going to start with trick number one
the first time saving feature I'm going to show you is to learn to group things together
so for example if you've created as I've done here a video and it's already got a nice introduction
and I know I won't be editing that introduction anymore what I can do is simply hold my mouse down
select all of those objects and then group them together and that means it's just one
object now and I don't need to worry about that because I know I'm not concentrating on that part
so it really helps to group things so that you've basically got them
all in one simple file and you haven't got to keep working on all the different files
it really does save time you can click and also ungroup as well to put them back so I often group
things when I'm working you know I'm working for a partner I think right okay this part here
um you know I need to I need to add something at the end so I'm just going to group that part
together there so just select the things I want to group together right click and group them together
and now I can perhaps even move that out the way and get on with something else and then put it
back in again afterwards it can save me a lot of time and makes working on the timeline much easier
this next time saving device or method is one that I use all the time every single video I
use now look if we play this video through and it's quite a long video it's about 11,
12 minutes you'll see that there's no highlighted cursor in any part of it and what I'm going to do
is simply just right click here and click on the button that says select all media on the track
it selects everything now I'm going to come down to the cursor choose the cursor and drag that
cursor on to the bottom line and you'll see that it adds the cursor to all of the videos all at the
same time all of them have been instantly updated and i can come over here now as well and just
change the opacity down to 60 percent great way of working click off the screen i'll click
in an empty space afterwards to deselect it so really simple right click and choose the option
of select all media on track and then you can add content specifically to all the media on all the
tracks at the same time works particularly well with the cursor another time saving trick that can
be really good is if you don't want to work with a particular channel lock it and what you can do
is you can come down here and very quickly lock a channel and if you lock a channel that means
nothing on that channel can be edited or changed and that can be really important for example when
you've got say another few layers that you're working with and you want to make sure that you
don't touch anything in that bottom channel in that bottom layer so you can just click on this
button here and lock it and I find that really helps me so say for example I'm working on this
initial part here and I don't want to touch this so I simply lock that channel and then I can
edit all the other objects on that part of the video but I can't edit this last part because it's
on a channel that's been locked so always look at the assets that are on a particular channel
and then you might think right I'm going to lock that channel for example here I might think I only
want to work on this so I'm going to lock this channel and I'm going to lock this channel because
I only want to work with this i don't want to be able to change this at all and that way you can
really focus in on exactly what you want to edit now while we're talking about tracks or channels I
sometimes call them channels but obviously the in Camtasia they're really called tracks this is
another lovely lovely feature watch this I'm going to lock this channel on this track and I'm going
to lock this track because I want to actually edit this audio here now the next thing I'm going to do
is move my timeline here and zoom right in and this is going to allow me now to do the editing
that I want to do but did you realize that you can do this if you come over to that track right click
you can actually maximize track and this really gives you a lot of control if you want to be
working with the audio particularly if you want to reduce it or add audio points
etc it really does give you the opportunity to get right in close to the channel and begin
to do your editing work so I often use this as a way let's say for example I want to reduce
the volume or I want to add in I need a an audio point okay and then perhaps another one here
it's so much easier to do this when I've expanded the channel or expanded the track sorry
so that I can see it really really clearly so I often do this and then I can start working now
with the audio points and making whatever changes I want to make etc I'm going to undo that
as I don't need to make those changes again you can always come back to the track and then you
can minimize the track and bring it back to normal size often that happens when you move it back to
more normal then you just have to kind of pull it out notice you can also just do it this way
okay so you can maximize the track by simply moving to it and making it bigger or smaller but
it helps me to work faster uh particularly when I'm working on really accurate accurate ways of
um or editing the audio okay another really useful thing to learn is to actually name your tracks and
you can do that easy by just right click clicking sorry and clicking on rename track now I've got
this track here called callouts and if we look at it there's a call out here there's another one
that comes on the screen here there's another one that comes on the screen here and there's
another one that comes on the screen here now what I can also do is this watch this I'm gonna
I can do it again two ways I can right click here and click again on select all media on the track
and now what I can do is I can come down to behaviours I can choose the behaviour and
I'm going to do slide I'm going to drag that and notice again it's applied to all four objects at
the same time so now these slide on the screen and then stay now I'm going to show you another little
trick that I do here I'm also going to click now on during and I don't like the animations
during I want the animation at the beginning nothing on when it's on the screen just want it to
be solid and clear and then nothing at the end so just changing it to during i'm going to click on
and choose none and now what's going to happen if we just play one of these animations very quickly
you'll see that the animation starts because the final website I'm going to recommend it comes
on to the screen it doesn't flash on this one called because I turned it off during so there's
no animation oh project it was shortlisted for the British council Elton's awards and it deals
with the topic of modern day slavery and obviously it helped okay so you can see how I can again by
just selecting the objects apply for example with behaviour to all of the objects and this is really
important if you're going to do this to make sure that you name a certain channel to do certain
things like you might have audio you might have main video you might have for example webcam video
you might have call outs etc this can work really well again to speed up the process of your editing
one of the most useful features of Camtasia 2021 is the library the
library is so useful to us because it's got all this different content that's available
and if we look here we've got icons and intros and lower thirds and motion backgrounds and music
tracks and outros I'm going to use an intro as an outro because I actually like a particular one I
use all the time I'm just going to show you how quickly we can do this I'm going to take this here
so these are pre-defined animations I'm going to drop that straight onto the screen and
I'm just going to kind of uh log coming a bit closer onto there so I can really see it well
okay and let's just play this animation a bit so you just see what happens at the end of the video
so we just get that coming on and then I'm going to write for example goodbye now at the moment it
says Camtasia Techsmith Camtasia but in fact if you come up to here and just click on the title
here and I'm just going to put put that to goodbye okay so I'm going to write goodbye and then
I'm going to press enter so the updates and now simply have a completely new animation at the end
comes on the screen opens up and says goodbye now if you want to learn more about
intros and outros there's a video on the screen now that you can click on to learn more
just a super quick bit of promo if you do like this video on Camtasia and you want more videos
please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com click on screen capture and there's plenty of
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okay my next trick is quite an advanced one but it's one again where we can use the library assets
to really save us a lot of time if you look here I've got some some green screen video recorded and
what I need to do is to change this setting so that the green is deleted from the image
that's how you do green screen you film yourself using green screen and then you delete the colour
green so that there's no green there's nothing behind you and then you add in a background
if you want to learn how to do this in detail there's a video on the screen now that's going
to show you exactly what to do but what I'm going to do is just very quickly take you through the
technique so watch this and this is going to show you a great time saving device I'm going
to come down here and click on visual effects I'm going to choose remove colour so I drag that
onto the screen here and then say well what colour do I want to remove well I want to remove
this colour so now the colour has been removed but we haven't got our background now we can
actually just change the tolerance slightly if we feel we need to do that I'm just going
to increase it there to 14 you can see it's really nice now we've got a dark background
but I need to now add in a background so what I'm going to do now is come again to my library
and one of the things that we've got is what we call motion backgrounds I'm just going to drag in
a motion background let's just choose one that I really like there's quite a lot of these now I'm
going to choose this one here called flying app so I'm going to just drag that onto the screen
and put it underneath that video so now what happens is and I may need to kind of put it on
twice if it's not long enough let me just show you the video goes on just slightly longer so
I can bring it on a second time so I'm just going to put the same applicator on and just bring that
down and make it a lot shorter there we are and now we've got a lovely video effect with me on
the screen and with some flying apps behind me if you're a language teacher or a language student
are looking for ideas on how to do a really nice effect is one that I often use and you can see
because we've got these library assets like motion backgrounds we can do this really really quickly
another really common mistake that I see people make and I'm gonna just lock this track to show
this in fact unlock this track and lock this track here we've got a track at the bottom here
that's got both audio and uh imagery on it it's a screen capture now it's really hard to edit the
audio here and what we can do actually is we can right click and we can separate the video and the
audio and you'll see now it creates two tracks and suddenly the audio is now available to edit
so when you're doing screen capture it's a really good idea sometimes if you want to work with the
audio and now we can obviously come right in close to the audio and work exactly with it let's say
for example we want to cut this little bit out here let's imagine that we want to cut that out
then what we can do is lock the track below and all we're going to do here is in fact pull this
out so that we completely cover that part of the audio right click and then click on this one
ripple delete and what that's going to do is it's going to cut that out and then connect the two
outside passes pits together and suddenly that piece of audio is completely gone I'm going to
show you that one more time let's say I want to cut this part of the audio out completely
what I can do is again make sure that I've got the other channels or tracks locked
pull the beginning and the end so that you've got the area marked that you want to delete
right click and click on ripple delete and suddenly that whole piece of audio will be cut
from the track ripple delete is very very useful as well as the idea of separating the audio and
the video okay in this next part I'm going to add an intro at the beginning but I'm also going to
add some audio and I'm going to show you a couple of great tricks with the audio now to make this
easy to do what I've done then I'll just quickly show you I'll ungroup it is that this is actually
quite complicated I'm going to select the whole of the animation or the whole of the video so far
I'm going to right click and group that all together so I've just got it as
one object and I don't need to worry about it now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add an
intro to this big video that I've got here so I'm going to come over to my library assets
and I'm going to click on intros and I'm going to drag this intro onto the screen now
if I quickly play this intro to you you'll see that it's very simple one and it just has a bit
of language there and what I'm going to do with that very simple is come over to this button here
and change that and delete that I'm going to put my name so I'm going to write Russell
Stannard so now I've got a nice hopefully press the enter button to change it and update it let's
just go back again and let me just make sure that I have got that actually selected right in fact
what I'm going to do is going to come in a little bit closer just make sure that really is right
up close so let's just play that a minute so now looking really good I've got this great animation
it's taken me no time at all I want some music to go along with this so what I'm going to do now
is come down to the music options that I've got and again this is in the library so I'm going to
choose a track I've got lots of tracks that I can choose and I'm going to use this one here firefly
now if you want to check your tracks you just double click on them and they'll play
okay now what I'm going to do is i'm actually going to drag that track
on underneath now straight away you see that the track is too long i want the music to end here
so i come to the end of the animation select the music track and then cut it so what I'm
going to do here is just simply cut the track click on this part of the track and delete it
so now we've got this great intro music along with the animation let's just play that
but there's one problem the music doesn't fade it plays right through and then kind of jumps out so
what we need to do then is come down to one of our another really good time saving device click
on more click on audio effects and simply what you want is fade out just drag that on to the end of
where that audio is and immediately it will fade out for you now here we can use our little trick
of maximizing the track or minimizing the track in this case you want to maximize it and I just want
to move that out a little bit I want it to fade a little bit later and now what I need to do just
one final thing is to bring back the rest of the video here it is so I'm just going to drag that
video back just drag that right back into place so that that video is also on there I can now make
that channel a bit smaller again no need for that let's just have a quick look at how this now works
this is a fantastic so lovely way of fading out the music without having to muck around with the
audio points by simply using the fade out I don't tend to use the fading but I make a lot of use of
the fade out really hope you like that video please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com
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screen now you're going to find some more videos about using Camtasia that you might find useful