Hi there Jason with TechSmith I'm going to make
some quick assumptions about the content you're looking to
create I'm going to assume that you
have some recorded lectures that
you've already recorded the videos are ready to go
you're confident in their capabilities
or maybe you have a PowerPoint presentation
either that's been recorded as a video or a
slide that you want to turn into a
video
I also know that there's a good chance that you
want to create videos much
quicker and with some
consistency so that you've branded
yourself so that the students or faculty
or whoever you're delivering content to
knows it's one of your videos or
that is part of a series well we
can do that with Camtasia and it's actually
fairly easy to do and it actually
relies on a lot of things that are built in the
Camtasia already in this
video I'm going to teach you about theming
using existing assets inside
Camtasia customizing those
assets and adding them to a
project to save as a template
for consistent video creation
let's start with theming
Themes in Camtasia allow you to take
basic tools like annotations
and many of the pre built assets and quickly
if a colorway or a
font style right to it by using the
drop down here in choosing a theme
for example I will use the TechSmith theme
and it immediately changes it to our yellow color
but that's not the colorway that you'd want to use
so let's show you how easy it is to create your
own styled theme
first I'm going to bring an item into my
media bin that I have stored on my
computer to do this I'm simply gonna
click import media and I'm gonna
locate where the item is here my
folder there it is the arrow
that I want to use and the reason I have it on my
screen is because since I'm not a designer
I want access to these colors so
to create a theme I'm gonna go to file
manage themes
it brings up our theme manager
to create a brand new theme from scratch I'm
gonna click the plus button and I'm
gonna name my theme and my team name is going to be
generic university
and from here it actually brings in a series of
colors but I can control all the colors
at any point I want so what my foreground
color which is reflected here as text
I'm gonna leave it as a nice white color
for background I'm gonna change it to
really stay in tune with the
colors of my arrow I have over here in
my media bin to do
this I select the drop down menu
and I choose the color picker tool
and then all need to do is hover over the color I want to
select in this case I'm gonna select this blue
color click it and now the
background color has been assigned to that blue color
I do this with all the colors in the
the theme that I want to utilize in case
we got a blue and green and
then for my accent color I'm gonna choose that
middle green right here
okay so this gives me a little bit of a
preview of what the color would look
like based on the theme that I have created
well I also want to use a specific font
and in this case I'm gonna choose the font tab
and I'm gonna use one of my
favorite font such as this Mueso sans
500 so that means whenever I
add anything that has taxes associated with it
it'll automatically apply this spot
to it when I apply the theme
and then I want to use the
logo capability of the theme manager
so click on logo and then I all
need to do is browse my computer for that
logo happens to be stored in this
case I not sitting here on my
desktop so must select it
choose open and now I have this
logo great echo
so I've applied colors of
font and logo
based on an existing image to
create a theme that we've called generic
university so when I click
save
and I choose any item in Camtasia
that I want to apply a theme to in this case I have a
call out on my screen wherever there's
a theme dropdown I should be
able to click that drop down and choose
the theme I created
this case generic university
so a theme is a great way to start
building consistency with your videos because
now with Camtasia twenty twenty
especially when I'm I'm in a tool
like the annotations tool I can
still use any of my calls that I'd
like but I can actually see what the look like
based on the theme I created by using the theme
drop down here and now
just like that I can grab any of
those call outs and they will maintain that
same theme color consistency
based on the theme drop down
pretty nice
now let's lean on campaign a little bit more
and that is by using some of the built in
assets that come free with
Camtasia in this case we're
going to go into our library and
choose the Camtasia twenty twenty library
there is a drop down menu here with any other
libraries you may have built but
for this example I wanna use Camtasia
twenty twenty
inside of this library there's actually three
folders I want to draw your attention to
the intros folder the lower
thirds and the
outros
that's because the items in each of these folders
are customizable
let me show you an example first
I'm going to clear everything off of my canvas
and I'm going to pick an intro
from this drop down menu
I'm partial to the state intro so we're going
add that one to our project here
by clicking and dragging it down onto
track number one
And we will zoom in for a little bit of detail
now when you play this video back with this intro
on the screen we'll see some colors
you'll see some text you'll even see the
Camtasia icon well
because it's customizable I simply
need to make sure it's selected like it is
and I come over to the properties panel on the right
this tab at the top is showing me the
quick property assets or the
customizable part of this intro
piece of media I can not only
change the titling the logo
the colors and the shapes but
because I've already created a theme I
can use the drop down the menu
choose the one we created generic
university
and with one click the logo has
been changed the colors have been
changed and the text
matches the font that I wanted it to be
so if I wanted to change the title to something
let's say science
one oh one
I can do it that way and then I could change the
subtitle to maybe professor
Valade
note I am not a professor
I can do that really simply
and then I can take this asset that we just
customize this the state intro and I
can save it for future use and there's
a couple ways I can do it one way is to
simply right click on it choose add
to library and rename it
for future use to be able to pull out of
my library but there's
another way to do it and that is by
using something new to Camtasia for
twenty twenty called templates
and that's going to allow us to take a couple of different
aspects that we've already built
and combine them into one template for
use so, so far we've
created this intro sequence
that has our title on it in our colors
and of course anytime I click on it I can
customize it over in the properties panel
the next thing I would add is something called a
place holder and a place holder
allows me to put a holder
on the timeline to enter
media in later remember we talked
about having existing content maybe a
video you've already shot maybe a power point
presentation you wanna use later to add a
place holder to our video all we need to do is
hit the hockey the letter P.
and when I push P. I have a place
holder dropped here on my timeline
the place holder is exactly that it allows me to
hold the place on the timeline because
it has customizable asset
availability to it as well I can
come over to the properties panel and give myself a little bit
more direction maybe instead of
placeholder I'm gonna put screen
recording
and that'll remind me that that's where I want to have a
screen recording but I could also give myself
notes use
fall class
content
that way I know I have
a note for myself to put content in there
from the fall as we
zoom out on our timeline we'll see
that there's a little note icon
at the end of the place holder that's showing me that
I have some sort of note for myself in this
case that use the fall
class content
one of the most powerful things about the
place holders in my opinion is that they hold the
properties of any sort of changes you make
to them in this case maybe I
want to go to my transition tool and
use the cube rotate
transition so if I click and drag
that transition down under the place holder
it has a a Q. rotation associated with it now
so it rotates in at the end of the
content it rotates out
just gives it a nice little polish and then later
on when I want to replace this media by simply
clicking on something in my media bin
or in my library and clicking and
dragging it on to that screen recording
placeholder when it turns green
it replaces it that
transition has been applied
to whatever media I put in that place
holder
it's pretty cool let's undo
that's we have the placeholder back on our screens
and I can add as many placeholders as I want to a
project so let's add one more here by hitting the letter
P.
and we'll change this place holder to
let's call the syllabus
and just like before I can add the same sort of
transitions of I'd like in this case we'll just go out the
same cube rotation
and now I have an intro to my video
I have a couple placeholders for myself so that I know
what content I want in there and now
for my sake I'd like to put a
outro so there are
outros built in the Camtasia twenty twenty
library but for consistency sake
I simply click on the intro I
use down here at the beginning right
click
copy
and then I pasted at the end
so I now have the same intro and
outro in the video
that I've already applied that
theme too and then all I need to do
is change out the title sequence
and the lower subtitle if I so choose
you know maybe you know projects
are due Friday projects
due Friday's
reach out for questions
and then all the sudden my video has
the customized introduction
a place holder here for screen recording or whatever I
choose it to be for a place holder here
for the syllabus or whatever I choose it to
be and a customizable
outro
the last couple things I would do for this video
to turn it into a template it's the lean on a
couple of more tools inside of
Camtasia first I want to
eliminate these gaps because right now I have
these things pretty spread out and there's gaps in between
the media well to fix the gaps
I simply turn on track magnetization over
here on the left hand side by clicking the magnet icon
it snaps everything together and leaves it all
nice and tight for my videos
and then to save it as a template I would go
to file save project as
template
and that'll bring up the template manager and I
simply need to name that template whatever I'd like it to
be quick note
wherever your play head is at that time
we will create a thumbnail for your video from that point
on so for us let's move our play head
back to the beginning maybe to show what the intro
slide looks like we'll do file
save project as template I'm gonna
name this one science
then hit okay
Camtasia now tells me that this template has been added
to the template manager which
means anytime I want to come into Camtasia
and create a video based on this template
which we can do right now just go to
create a new project here
we would go to file
manage templates or
file new project from
template
and simply choose a template we
created now videos can be
made from one to the next with a
great amount of consistency based on a
little bit of work we did up front
I hope you found this useful if there's anything else we
can help you with in terms of your classroom in
Camtasia please don't hesitate to reach
out thanks