When you record at full screen, or with any large dimensions, sometimes it’s difficult to see the details of your video when producing to
much smaller dimensions…such as on a mobile device or a website.
That’s where Camtasia’s SmartFocus feature can help.
SmartFocus automatically predicts where to zoom in during your video to make it easier to see things on your screen.
All this happens behind the scenes during recording, as SmartFocus analyzes the position of your mouse cursor, which windows
are active, and when text is entered.
SmartFocus then uses this data to add zoom animations to your timeline in the editor.
One important thing to note is that SmartFocus will only work with Camtasia Recording, or .camrec, files.
It will not work when saving your recordings to the AVI format, or with other video formats that can be imported into Camtasia Studio.
You can still manually zoom and pan with other video formats…but the SmartFocus data just won’t be present.
Let’s take a look at how SmartFocus is applied, and then how easy it is to edit and add new zoom animations.
As long as the editing dimensions that you choose are smaller than the recording dimensions…SmartFocus will automatically
be applied to the Timeline.
If SmartFocus is applied, you’ll see this pop up on the timeline.
You will also see these blue visual animations that represent where SmartFocus was automatically applied.
Their placement is predicted based on data collected during the recording.
You can position the playhead before any of the animations and playback the video to see what happens in the canvas.
Here, it looks like this zoom is focusing in on the calculator as the mouse pointer is clicking the keys.
To reposition when the zoom happens during the video, click and drag the animation on the timeline.
It’s also very easy to make quick edits to an animation.
Just double-click one of them and the Visual Properties Tab opens.
The visual properties give you tons of control over how your media looks and appears in your video.
This also includes editing your zoom animations.
Adjust the scale of your zoom by dragging this slider…and see the changes instantly on the canvas.
If you’re zooming in, targeting 100% is a good rule to follow because that’s where your video will be the clearest.
Anything over 100% may cause your video to look blurry or pixelated.
You can also adjust the opacity…and other visual effects, but we’ll cover these more in the Visual Properties tutorial.
Besides using the scale slider to adjust the zoom level, it’s also possible to grab one of the corners on the canvas to scale your video.
You may need to change the percentage of view on the canvas using this drop-down menu, or the scroll wheel on your mouse,
to see more of your recorded video.
Then just drag the recording to reposition what you want to show inside the preview area of the canvas.
Anything outside of this video preview area will not show up in the produced video.
Once the video is zoomed into this new location, it will remain there until it either reaches the end of the clip,
or another animation.
Let’s play back the video just before this next animation to see what happens.
Now the focus is on the Notepad document… and everything else is not visible in the video.
Again, if this animation needed to be edited, just double-click it and make the changes within the Visual Properties tab.
Let’s say you don’t want to use SmartFocus, or you want to manually control where to add any zooms and pans in your video. No problem.
First, let me show you how to turn off SmartFocus.
Click to open the Zoom-n-Pan tab, and uncheck this box next to “Apply SmartFocus to clips added”.
Now, any new clips added to the timeline won’t automatically add the zoom-n-pan animations.
To remove any, or all existing animations from a clip…right-click one of them and either choose delete, or delete all visual animations.
If you have multiple clips on the timeline, you will have to delete all visual animations separately from those clips.
To add a visual animation manually, first, select the media and position the playhead where you want to add the animation.
If you don’t have any media selected on the timeline, you will see this message in the Visual Properties tab.
So, with the media selected, click the Add animation button.
If you like keyboard shortcuts, the hotkey “Z” will also work…
...but again, the media must be selected on the timeline in order to add an animation.
You can resize and reposition the video on the canvas so that it shows exactly what you want at this point in the video.
As an alternative, you can also reposition the level of zoom from within the Zoom-n-Pan tab.
Whatever is placed inside this selection rectangle on the left gets displayed in the video at this point in time.
Now it’s up to you to decide if you want SmartFocus to help guide you with when to zoom and pan,
or take over the control yourself and add the visual animations manually.
The next tutorial in this series will show you how to cut out, or remove, unwanted media on the timeline.
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