Camtasia Basics - Video Editing for Beginners

Let me introduce you to the section about the Camtasia Studio Screen Recorder.

In this Camtasia lecture we will check available options in the Camtasia Screen Recorder. How to open and use it.

Recording your screen is a straightforward task with Camtasia Studio. The Screen Recorder remained basically the same since Camtasia Studio 9 and allows us to simply hit the record button and start recording what we see on our screen.

The TREC file system is the backbone of Camtasia's uniqueness. When we make a recording with the Camtasia Screen Recorder apart from our screen it also holds information about our system sounds, our mouse movement and other information that can be altered within the Camtasia editor once we edit our videos.

Let me show you the resources you can use within this course. You can make your own recording or use my pre-recorded elements in order to make it a little easier.

Importing footage is a simple process of taking files from your PC or storage device and importing them into Camtasia. The process, just as the Screen recorder remained the same over the years since Camtasia studio 8 and 9. In newer versions of Camtasia like Camtasia 2019, Camtasia 2020, Camtasia 2021, Camtasia 2022 and Camtasia 2023 everything stays the same and we can press CTRL+I to import or just click on the Import Footage button.

In order to understand the process of video editing we should explain a couple of terms that we will be using throughout the course. Additionally, its worth mentioning that Camtasia has a few native and self-named options that we should see, know, and understand. We will explain what behaviors are, animations, the timeline, footage, and so on.

The timeline allows us to change a few features to suit our editing needs and be more efficient at what we do. In this lecture let us try to disable the audio on a particular layer, select or deselect its visibility, and lock layers so we won't be able to move them. We will also enlarge or make timeline tracks smaller.

Within Camtasia we can also do simple sound editing and alter the gain of the audio itself. In this lecture I want to show you how to use Camtasia 2023 and Camtasia 2024 to change the sound volume and alter a few other things about it.

Trimming footage in Camtasia is one of the most essential things we need to learn and do. Here I will show you how to navigate the timeline and split clips, make clips shorter, delete parts of them and trim them.

One interesting feature in Camtasia I wanted to mention is adding clip speed. This is often used when we only have a brief moment to explain something but want to display a condensed version of our video within that time.

In this lecture, we are learning how to group objects on the Camtasia timeline and how these groups work. In older versions of Camtasia we had to open the groups live on the timeline. Since Camtasia 2021, following Camtasia 2022 and Camtasia 2023, we can now open groups in new tabs which makes it a little easier and quicker to navigate and jump between the timeline and open groups.

Do you remember some of the features?

Camtasia is set up in a way so all features are hidden within menu tabs on the left side. In this lecture, I'd like to discuss the Favorites, Media tab and the library we can make and prepare in Camtasia.

In this lecture, we will learn about the most important tool there is in Camtasia - annotations. Annotations help us improve Camtasia visuals and the way we explain things by highlighting or sketching a rectangle over something so its easier to spot for the viewer.

Camtasia adds more and more visual effects we can apply with each new version. In this lecture, I'd like to take a look at the possibilities that the visual effects have and what visual effects can we actually use during editing.

The transitions tab since Camtasia 2022 and later in Camtasia 2023 added an enormous amount of transitions to choose from. In order for them to not be overwhelming let us add a few favorites and take a brief look through the available options.

Normally by animation, we understand movement over time. In Camtasia, the animations tab is actually used for camera movement and zooms. Newer versions of Camtasia (if I recall since 2019) behaviors were added. Behaviors are what you would normally thing are animations, and animations are camera movements. Let me explain that in this lecture.

In the previous lecture, we explained the Zoom n pan feature in Camtasia and what animations are. In this lecture I'd like to showcase behaviors, what they are, how to use them, how to change their properties and save a template for later use.

In this lecture, I will showcase what you can do with the mouse pointer if you have a Camtasia trec recording. If not you can still "design" the mouse movements thanks to new features that allow us to create the mouse path from scratch,

Camtasia allows us to edit the audio we have recorded. We can cut it, trim it, increase or decrease the gain, and if you understand a bit more we can actually also use audio effects like a compressor. It works like any other compressor so we can adjust the ratio, threshold and make-up gain. Depending on your level of understanding you can go from simpler features to more advanced audio effects.

We will start our practical video editing section by adjusting the settings of our project - we will specify a resolution and frame rate and import footage in case we don't already have it inside of Camtasia.

Let us trim the footage files we have in order to make our video. In this lecture, I will guide you through my process of trimming footage in Camtasia.

Adding sketch motions is vital to making videos simply look good and stand out. Let us prepare a sketch motion, adjust its speed, size and color to make it more fitting and pretty up our video.

In this lecture, we will use the custom animation we were learning about earlier. We will zoom'n'pan into a part of our screen and then go back with a zoom-out. This allows our tutorials and videos to be more interactive and easy to read for the viewer.

Transitions are most often used as animations between two kinds of footage. In this video  let us use a fade transition to fade our video out for an end screen / thank you card.

In this lecture we will finalize our video by adding a "Thank you" card at the end.Let us design it by adding an annotation with text and animating it.

This lecture explains how to export videos in Camtasia. I will show you the feature in its entire glory, what options we have, what types of files we can export and how to actually export our video to a ready MP4 file.

Thank you very much for taking part in this Camtasia course. Let me briefly say a few thank you words, applaud and congratulate you to this achievement!

Additional lecture.