Hello, this is Cristi. Welcome to my first episode of Camtasia Q and A,
questions I take on my social media channels on the Facebook group for Camtasia Beginners or on
LinkedIn or by email or any other way. So this one is going to be a very short video today.
I got a question from Chris Menard and he's asking, I'm doing a lot of zoom in my tutorials,
like zooming in and out, but I find it tedious to get back to 100% and the original state
of the video in Camtasia. Is there an easy way to get to 100% and lined up correctly?
So I have a project here that I do. So this is a very nice question from Chris. I actually
edit some of his videos, this is one of the projects that he has, and in this project,
I do a lot of zooming in and out. And usually in projects in Camtasia, I do a lot of zooming in,
particularly when I show portions of the screen, like if it's a tutorial, I zoom into the area
that I need to show, or he's talking about some feature and it helps to zoom in and focus on that
area to just to emphasize and to show the viewer what he's talking about while he's explaining.
So in this project down here, as you can see, there are two video streams. One with Chris,
if I turn off this, um, you know, you can see the video stream going off. That's the camera
that Chris is using. And the second stream is the actual screen recording. As you can see the, in
the background, there's the screen there, so this is that track, which I'm turning off an on now.
During the editing, I may end up on a portion where I want to zoom in, like I said,
so if you zoom in here on the timeline, you can see that I got to a point here and I have
the zooms, these animations, and look what happens when I play these in the viewport.
You can see the screen zooms in and pans around to show the area that I'm showing. Well, that
is Chris's question, how can you quickly get back to 100%, if you have zoomed in
and your screen is kind of enlarged. So as you can see here, if I zoom out of the
canvas and if I click on this, look, this is actually the video recording of the screen.
It's been scaled up and I'm just focusing on this area of the window right here,
and you can see that everything else is outside of the canvas. Now it's very, you know,
the first thing you may think about is to just grab the handles and kind of pull them back in
like this and make sure they align and then move the video like this and then align it again.
So that can be a little tedious, and it's possible that you may
have a mistake there on you may zoom out too much. So like you see here, look,
I zoomed in too much, and my canvas now has a black area, which is going to show up on
the video. So what I need to do is actually make sure that this video fits perfectly on the screen.
So the way that I do this is, and I usually actually just do it with an animation as well,
because I want it to just zoom in smoothly, not just you know, appear, you can do that too, you
can, uh, make it appear like suddenly boom scaled out again, and it fits the screen, but a very
nice animation for that, and it's actually custom made in Camtasia, you can go to the Animations and
you've go to the tab Animations and you can see all of these pre-made animations here in Camtasia.
Well, the one we need is Scale to Fit and what this does is, it animates a zooming out motion
from wherever your video is, and it puts it back into place and it makes it fit in the canvas.
That's the animation you need. So look, if I'm in here, look, these are the two animations
that I have, let me just silence the audio here because I don't care for the audio, so
if I play this look it's zooming in, and then it moves to fit the other window in place.
Maybe I'm actually zooming into focus on that particular window right here,
so you can see it, now. It shows up in here. So now my animation does this, it zooms in
and then pans down, so my screen, as I told you, when I'm ready to go back to the screen,
let me just delete this other animation down here, when I'm ready to finish showing this
particular fragment of the screen and see the whole screen again, this is what you do.
You drag the scale to fit onto the clip. So watch what happens, when I pull this in the. The video
now is back in full screen like that. So look what this animation does, if you watch it play.
It just zooms back in place. So this is Scale to fit.
And this animation, you can actually do it manually too, using a custom animation,
but you need to worry always about making sure the edges align and the corners align,
and you don't have any blank areas and all that stuff while this is actually built to fit.
So, one thing that does this it just brings your screen back to position zero, if you want to the
main zoom while keeping all the action you've done before, you know, look this is zooming in still,
and it's on my timeline. And when it reaches the point where I want to see the full screen, again,
it just does that. It zooms out. That is very easy to use.
And actually, this is one of my favorites, you can see it's got the star icon in the corner.
That means it's one of my Favorites animation, and it's been added to my Favorites tab. If
you go on the left here, to your Favorites, you can see it, there is got Scale to fit,
I also have other stuff, you know, like transitions and stuff I use all the time.
So you just press F and you end up in your
Favorites tab and you can just drag it to your video to always go back to a hundred percent zoom.
If I go down the timeline again, and I decide that I'm getting to this point where I say, oh,
I actually want to zoom in again here, so I'm going to just click on the video.
Add a custom animation, by the way, the custom animation Shift and A. Add a custom animation
and I do something, I zoom in again, I just scale this video and I go, I don't know, let me focus
on this particular corner right here, right. Then I may actually want to go and do something else,
Shift an A, again, another animation I'm going to zoom, I'm going to pan to the left.
And at this point right here, I may decide to go back to 100%. So just drag the Scale to fit
right here. And it always ends and when you drag it, you know, you place your play head
at the point where you want to be back to 100%, that's where you make the animation end. And so,
as you can see here, my play head is right here and my animation ends right at the playhead.
And now let's see what I did, I just had three animations, all one after the other,
it's zooming into that corner, and then after a while it just moves to the left, and then
after a while, I'm ready to go back. So it just zooms back out, a hundred percent, no effort.
You don't need to worry about, you know, aligning it and all that stuff.
If you want the return to 100% to be slower or smoother, all you need to do is just pull
the end or the one of the ends of this arrow and just make the arrow longer.
Making the arrow of an animation longer, will make that animation slower and it will, you know,
it will happen across more frames than before.
So watch this, I'm going to make that very, very smooth. So right after the second
animation watch this, it starts zooming out, very, very smoothly, until it stops.
So that's it. This is how you bring your screen or your video recording back to 100%
or any other objects, really. If I want to bring Chris,
just as an example, just to prove this, I want to bring Chris back to 100% on the screen.
You can see that the video of Chris is kind of small, it's in the corner,
and one side of it, although you don't see it because it's a green screen,
is actually out of the screen. But if I want to bring Chris to full screen, at some point,
all I have to do is just go here and drag Scale to fit on the Chris video.
So watch what happens now, Chris zooms back in and is full screen. So
that's how you do it, this is how you restore your video to 100%.
I have to tell you one tip, I don't actually use these animations from the Zoom and Pan
section. The reason is because they all work together and they affect all the tracks,
and I'm so annoyed because you can't really control what they do, very, very precisely. S
really, all I do is just go to the Animations tab and use Custom Animation for pretty much any type
of movement I want to have on my screen. Any type of animation, I just use custom.
And the second one is this Scale to Fit. As you can see, both of these are in my favorites,
I do not use any of these other ones because you know, I don't need them.
These ones do everything I need. So there it is. I hope this was helpful.
If you have a question about Camtasia, feel free to put it in the comments or put it in the
Camtasia Help for Beginners group on Facebook or LinkedIn,
reach me on LinkedIn or wherever you can reach me even on my website and ask your question.
I would be very happy to make a video on it, or point you to a video that I've already made
or any other articles or help topics to help you with
your question. So feel free to ask away and I am very grateful for your questions. You know,
I may do a video on it. So thanks again for watching. Thanks for your time.
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