The new canvas in Camtasia Studio gives you more flexibility and power in creating great screencasts.
This tutorial will help you take advantage of these improvements by covering the most essential concepts
you’ll need to understand what the canvas is, how it works, and how to interact with it.
The canvas is, in one way, like a painting canvas—where you arrange how things look for your video.
In another way, the canvas is like a wall with a window that allows you to see what’s going to be in your produced video.
While in real life how big or small something you see through a window seems to be depends on how close or far away it is…
…in video editing the size viewers see depends on how much it is “scaled” up… …or down.
Also, if something is exactly the same proportion, width-to-height—video people call this the “aspect-ratio”—as the window,
you can “scale” it to fill up the entire opening.
Otherwise, you’ll see some space around it.
This gray border on the canvas is essentially the window’s edges,
which define the boundaries of what your viewers are going to see.
Anything beyond the border won’t be visible in your produced video.
Here’s what it may look like on the canvas (with media extending beyond the border)…
…and what the produced video will look like.
Now let’s move on to how to interact with the canvas.
One of the great things about the canvas is that it allows for “direct manipulation”—this means that you can use your cursor to
change how media appears.
For example, if you don’t like where something is, instead of having to adjust numbers in a dialog, you can just drag it to where you want.
There are also these really nice snapping lines.
If you want your media right against the edge, you just drag it until you see the yellow line along the side.
If you want to put something exactly in the center, just drag it until it snaps there and the lines in the middle appear.
You can also resize anything on the canvas by dragging the handles on the corners and edges.
When you drag the corners, Camtasia Studio will preserve its aspect ratio, …but when you drag the handles on the edge,
the media will only stretch that way and get skewed. Usually you don’t want to do this for video or images.
If you have a need to rotate a video or an image drag the handle just to the right of the media’s center.
This is very useful for video that comes in on its side.
Another thing you can change about the canvas is how much of it you see at once.
When working on your video, sometimes you need to see a lot of detail…
…but sometimes you need to see the whole thing…
…especially if you’re creating a large-sized video.
This zooming in and out of the canvas is the equivalent to putting your face up against the window…
…or taking a step or two back.
One of the easiest ways to get these different views of the canvas is to scroll with your mouse.
Scrolling up zooms in… …and scrolling down zooms out.
You can also see and change the zoom level here.
Now, while this changes your view of the canvas to make editing easier, zooming the canvas doesn’t change what your
viewers will see or the actual size of your produced video.
Also, setting the zoom level to 100% will allow you to see your video at the size and clarity it will be produced (
unless, of course, you change the dimensions later).
Finally, if you right click on any of the media on the canvas, you’ll see options to change what’s in front or in back
when you have multiple items overlapping.
You can also see and change this order on the timeline—what’s in front on the canvas, is on top in the timeline.
If you found this tutorial helpful, I strongly suggest also watching the Timeline In-depth tutorial as well to really
solidify your knowledge of how Camtasia Studio works.
Here's a link to a survery where you can let us know what you thought of this tutorial. Thanks for watching!