Hello, this is Cristi, and this is another episode where I answer one of your questions.
And this question is today from someone who's asking, would you please create a video that
shows how to grow or shrink a graphic? I've done it, but just by trial and error and accident. So
I'd like to have a video where my logo starts small and grows larger in a few seconds.
So this is a very easy to achieve feature in Camtasia, so I'm going to show you right now.
It's very easy. So I am bringing my logo in here into Camtasia. You can see it in my Media bin.
So what I want to do is, I want to first decide how long do I want this logo to be on the screen?
So let's say I want to have it on screen maybe for 10 seconds, because it's part of my intro
or I want to use that as a lower third on the bottom left corner maybe or something like that,
that doesn't, you know, that's the first question you have to ask. Where does the logo
show up and how long is it going to be on the screen?
So I'm just going to drag this logo on the screen right here, so you can see it there. Now you can
see it on the bottom left on the timeline. If I zoom in on the timeline with Control and mouse
wheel, you can see now the logo is on the timeline here and it stops at around five
seconds. Maybe you want to have it five seconds or not, you can make it sit on the screen longer
by just dragging the edge here of the timeline and let's suppose we stop around the ten-second mark.
So this logo is going to be on the screen for 10 seconds from the start of the video. That's first
question. The second thing, I'm going to give you a bonus tip, you may have noticed that Camtasia
resized my canvas to fit the logo. The reason for that is because I didn't have any video clips on
my timeline. This may not be your situation, if you already have a video clip on the timeline, on
the canvas, Camtasia is not going to automatically resize it. But one thing that Camtasia does,
which I think should be an option you could turn off and on is,
when you drag your first clip onto your canvas, it tries to resize your canvas to fit that clip,
which means now my video, if I export this video now, it's going to have this shape. It's not going
to be HD screen widescreen 16:9 or whatever, it's going to be this weird size of my logo,
which I don't know. I don't want this to happen so I don't know why this is doing is
done it, you know, it's probably trying to protect people from making mistakes and having black bars.
Anyway, if Camtasia did this for you, you need to go back to this top,
drop down here and go to Project Settings and make sure you put your screen back to full HD,
or whatever, you know, whatever the screen project size you want to have. If you have,
if you want to have like a 4K screen or a 720p or something for Instagram,
it doesn't matter. You just need to make sure it is what you want it to be,
not what Camtasia thinks it is going to be. So I'm going to make it back to HD, so I'm going
to have a wide screen here. Now you can see the logo fits on top there, on top of the canvas.
So here's my answer to the question. The second question is, and of course,
the second question you need to ask yourself is how large do we want the logo to start
as, and how large do I want it to become during this growing or shrinking operation?
So I'm going to move my playhead somewhere here. So the logo is going to sit there and at some
point it's going to start to do something. What I want the logo to do is to grow, so before I add
any animation to my timeline, I want to resize the logo so that it has the starting size that I want.
So in this case, I'm going to just, you know, select the logo and you can drag the corners
like this, to make it smaller. And if you hold down the Control key,
it does it from the center. So if your logo is in the center of the screen, you just drag it,
holding down the Control key, and it, you can see that it, it resizes the logo around the center.
So I'm going to make it this big and this is where I want to start my animation. And over the course
of three or four seconds, let's suppose, let's make a small animation, I want this logo to kind
of come closer to the camera or increase in size. So what I want to do is go to the Animations,
switch from the Zoom and Pan tab to the Animations tab.
I know it's very tempting to use zoom and pan here and scaling and all that stuff because
having the object selected, you can click and look, it kind of zooms into
that object. And that might be, oh, that's what I want to do. And look,
Camtasia has already added an animation on the timeline, just because I did that.
So that is one way to do it, but don't do it like this because what you want is
you want to be a professional and you want to learn the proper way.
So I'm going to click on that animation and delete it. So now go to the Animations tab
and what you need is the Custom animation. And let me just tell you, I always say this, if you learn
how to master the Custom animation in Camtasia, you will never use any other animation that's
pre-built in there because you're going to know exactly what it does, where the object starts,
where it ends, how long does it take to grow? All those things are in this Custom animation.
So you notice my logo is now sitting there doing nothing. I want to grab this Custom animation
from the Animation tab in the Animation section, and just grab that and put it on the video clip
or the picture clip in the timeline of the logo. Release that. And now, if I play this animation,
nothing is happening. The reason for that is, I haven't actually told it what to do
over the course of that animation, right? So look, I'm playing here,
and there's nothing happening. What I want to do is, the Custom animation works with two points,
the starting point and the ending point. So if I zoom in here on the timeline,
you can see that the animation happens over the course of about a second.
So, before the animation starts, which is this starting point here, also called a keyframe,
because the keyframe means Camtasia records and remembers in that frame or
in that point, what the position, what the size of the object was.
So animation, really what it does is changes those values from that to something else
over the course of, let's say a second here. So what I want to do is I want to
go to the end of this animation, which is the second keyframe and tell it
what should be the state of my object in that point. So, as I said in the question as well,
you know, we want the logo to grow in size at the end of the animation.
So I'm going to hold down the Control key again, make sure I select the logo, make sure the play
head is positioned there in that keyframe or after it, and just hold down Control and scale the logo
about this size. So now look, I go back on my play head here and I play it now.
There you go, the logo has increased in size.
Why? Because on the second keyframe, I told it to be larger. On the first keyframe, I told it to be
smaller or small as in the original size. So that is really the basics of animation in Camtasia.
You have your animation, your keyframes and your object that the animation applies to.
So if you want to make this animation smoother, so let's suppose one second is too fast. Boom,
it does it. All you need to do is, you just grab this keyframe and you make the animation longer.
And Camtasia really builds all the frames in between.
So whatever you're saying at the ends, I want the logo to be large in one end,
I want the logo to be small on the other end, Camtasia will interpolate all of the other
sizes and movements and whatever needs to happen for that state to transform into the other state.
So that is really if you understand how this works,
you can do anything with animation. So let's play this, this is should be now much smoother.
Yeah, you can see the logo coming in very nicely.
So what about shrinking it? Well, as the play head moves along, your video or clip
or image or whatever it is that you apply the animation on, still is on the screen.
So what I want to do is after a couple of seconds, I want to start making it smaller,
let's suppose. So here again, you can drag more than one custom animation to your object.
So I'm going to grab this custom animation again, place it here.
You can see it kind of starts earlier, like what about a second earlier, that is something you can
change in the Settings. What is the default length of a custom animation? And this time, what I want
at the end of this animation, I want the logo to be small again. So again, I can click on the
last keyframe there and hold down the Control key, and grab the handle and make the logo quite small.
Like that. So now over the course of a second again, the logo's going to be small again. So
watch this, play from here, the logo shrinks again. So that is your Custom animations for you,
and you can apply as many as you like to any clip. Look, I've got two on this video clip,
now here, if I want to add another one, I can move the play head somewhere else
and Shift and A to add a custom animation, that's the shortcut.
And I want to do something else. Maybe I want to rotate the logo, look
so over the course of one second, I want to grab this rotation handle, you can see right here
and rotate the logo and turn it upside down. Boom. So you know, I'm not shrinking,
I'm not scaling. I'm just rotating, look. And the logo turns around. Whatever property you change
in the final keyframe will become the state that the object arrives at during the animation.
Right? So that is how to answer this question. I hope I was clear enough. So if you have any other
questions, make sure you ask them in the comments. And if you have other questions about Camtasia,
anything else, feel free to ask them and I may make a video on it. I love to answer questions,
feel free to join my Camtasia for Beginners Help Facebook group.
If you're on Facebook or join me on LinkedIn. And you know, if you have any other questions,
let me know how I can help you. And I love to help and I really also need
video ideas, so there you go. Win-win thanks for watching and I will see you on the next one.