Hello, this is Cristi. In this video I will show you a new feature that was just introduced in
Camtasia 2023. It's called Audio Visualizers, and at the moment you only have three of them
to customize and use in your projects. I've been meaning to do this for a while,
and I kept thinking of ways to achieve this and I did it in the past, but it was like very,
very convoluted and complicated. This way, that TechSmith has provided these now, it's to use
some graphics that are added to your library and you add them to your project and then you have a
lot of customization options for them to make them react to music, react to audio, and provide those
nice animated visualizers for your videos. Maybe you can use them in Social Media clips or Tik Toks
or whatever you want to use it, or even podcast episodes where you want to show some movement
on the screen. So there's a bunch of ways to use this. Let's have a look at how they work.
So I'm here in Camtasia 2023 for Mac, but it also works on Windows,
and I just added a music track to my project.
This is a song I'm playing on piano. And let's see how we can use these
visualizers. You have to go to your library, but before you do that,
make sure you update Camtasia to the latest version. The version that I have
of Camtasia is 2023.2.0. It is just released yesterday, August 22nd, 2023. So there we go.
This is how you use this. You have to go to your library. There should be a new folder
here in your Camtasia 2023 library, it's called Audio Visualizers, and if you open that folder,
all you have is like three of these visualizers. All you have to do is just add those to your
timeline right there on top of your music, and there you go, you have a visualizer.
You can extend for how long you want this visualizer to last. I can expand it to last for
the whole song, but I want to show you all three of them. So I'm only going to apply this for one
portion here. So this one is called 'Audio bars', and if I play the music, watch the animation.
There you go. So that's how it reacts to the music on the project. Now, I don't know if there is a
plan to allow this to filter which audio files to react to, because if you have speech and music,
maybe you just wanted to react to speech and leave the music alone. I'm not sure, but I
think right now it's reacting to the whole audio that's happening on your timeline at that time.
So this is some of the customizations you can do for this thing. You can change the hue shift,
so watch this. It kind of cycles through the colors so that you can have some,
I don't know, eighties looking kind of music there visualizing,
and I don't actually need to play the music to hear this. You can just cycle and it's
going to show you what would happen, what it would look like for that portion of the music.
Okay. And also you can change the bar width to make the bar thicker
or thinner like this with some spacing in between them. You can change the count,
which is how many bars you want to use. Actually, let me move this closer to the
controls here so we can zoom in. So the bar with, of course, changes the width of the bar,
and you can change the height as well to make them taller or shorter to react to the music.
And a nice one is I can mirror the X axis. Watch this. Now, it's a symmetrical one on the left and
the right, it looks the same. So if I move it, you will see they both move in the same, at the
same time. And then of course, you can mirror Y to put these bars on both sides of the horizontal
axis. So that's actually quite attractive to me, I kind of like this one. Okay. And another thing
you can change here is the maximum frequency to which it going to react, or if you pull it down,
it's going to react to more frequencies. And again, minimum frequency is so that you can
change the minimum audio frequency to which it's going to produce a movement in the bars.
So that's kind of how this works.
Okay, let's have a look at another one. The second one is an audio ring. I'm going to
move this here where I don't have any visualizers. Put audio ring on there.
And this is a round one. It functions pretty much the same as the other one. Watch this.
If you have a podcast or a extract and you have your picture in the middle, you can put your
picture in the middle and have this thing round animated around your head, your avatar, whatever.
And again, this one has the same customization. You can hue shift. You can change how many bars
show up and the width of the bars and the height, you know, make it more dramatic like that.
And then you've got a taper there. And the roundness,
the roundness is the corner roundness of the bars. You can make them round. And then also
the radius of the entire circle. So you can have a larger circle if you like.
You can of course scale this because this is an object that
you can scale. You can move it around, you can place it anywhere you like.
You can place it around your picture. And maybe if you have a talking head,
like I showed in other videos, this one could also be around your talking head
and it could react to your speech. And one that I really like on this one is to mirror
the Y axis like this. Again, it shows it on both sides of the line, the baseline there,
and you know, you are flexible to use these and do other things with them.
Of course, you can't build your own, but you can also animate these like I add
an animation on this one. Look. There's an animation there, and let's say that,
you know, during that motion, during that song, I am actually going to rotate this
around the Z-axis a few times, right? So now when it's playing, it's also rotating.
Get creative with them as well.
Now another one, is the Audio Wave. So if I add this one to my video,
this is a simple line and it's a wavy line. And of course, again, it reacts to music.
And you can customize the width, you can make it fit the whole screen, if you like. And also,
again, on this one, you can change the color. You can make it bright white or whatever. You
can change the thickness of the line. You can change how many samples it reacts to.
So it's much more wavy. It's probably this one requires more processing power to do.
So, you know, it's even more animated like that. If you reduce the samples,
the line becomes like a vector line, really. If you reduce them all the way,
it doesn't really do much. It just jumps up and down. So that's what controls that. Then
the height you can see adjusting the height makes the waves taller and more dramatic.
And also the width, you can concentrate on a more narrow sample window, like that.
Okay, so this one honestly, It looks a little more boring than the other ones,
which are more dramatic in appearance.
So one way that I really like to play and I played with this earlier, was to combine these with other
effects that you have at your disposal in Camtasia. For example, I really like to
combine things with the Media Mat, right? So let's have a look. I'm going to remove these two, and
we're just going to play with the bars for this example. So I'm just going to stretch all these
bars all around here. So you see the bars that I have, let's make them a bit larger, like this.
So one way to do this is really, look at this, you get an annotation and you put
some text on your scene. Let's make this one quite large and let's make it bold and I'm
going to actually make it like 500. Camtasia only lets you do 500 for fonts. But anyway,
this is the font. So watch this. One way to do this is either to put a mask on the text, right?
So the text is above the audio bars on the timeline,
right? So look at this. So now if I apply a Media Mat effect from Visual Effects,
let's go to Media Mat right there and apply that to the text. Look, my bars are now playing inside
of that. So that's quite interesting. If I get the bars and I turn off the mirroring on the Y axis,
I have some bars now that show up on my text. Let's go to the bottom there. Alright,
so watch this. This is really cool.
Okay. If you want them to jump around better, you can probably make them a little shorter,
not so high. And of course if that's hard to see, you copy your text layer,
you paste that as a new track, and you remove the Media Mat on it,
and then you change the opacity so that it's behind, or maybe move it behind the bars.
So look, you've got your text, but the music now is playing inside of
those that mask. Quite an interesting effect. Another one is to show the mask, put the mask,
the Media Mat on the bars themselves, and they will reveal the text as they are playing. So watch
this. If I instead move these bars above the text, right, and I take the Media Mat Off from the text,
let's turn it off, and apply a Media Mat to the bars themselves like this. Watch this! And
I should remove the second one there and remove any blank tracks. Here we go. Now look at this.
So I'm creating this bar mask. Using the bars, I'm creating a mask on my text,
so now they only reveal the text. So of course the colors don't really work anymore because
that's not what is doing. The mask is binary. So watch this as I'm moving this through the music,
the text is being revealed. So you can really play with this.
And as I was saying, all these bars react to the music that's playing, which means I can
actually take more of these bars and I create a copy of them and I take the mask off for these,
the Media Mat, right? So now I can put these behind my text and there is an interesting
effect too. I can see the text through it, but also there's a mask, so it only reveals for that.
So it's quite interesting, right? So you can create all of these cool effects with
these bars and, you know, you can actually copy these again,
and you know, you can rotate them. You can do a mirrored kind of reflection thing there. You
can change the opacity of them so they look like they're in a reflection in the water.
Yeah, so plenty of flexibility. Your imagination here is, you know, you don't have to be confined
just to the examples that they give you. You can play an experiment with this and I think
you can also add motion blurt. To them, although I don't think you can add the
Motion Blur to the individual bars, that would be interesting and a lot of processing power there.
But if you animate these and move them around, you can have motion blur on those as well. And there,
there you go. So visualizers, these are cool. If you create social media clips, for example,
you can put your video in the frame and you put these bars and customize them,
and you can have a vertical video for Tik Tok or Instagram.
Let me know in the comments if you'd like me to show a tutorial on how to do that. You
would probably need to transcribe somehow, the audio if you want to show the animated text. I
wish TextSmith introduced that in Camtasia as well, like they do in Descript. And you know,
you would probably have a very nice Social Media creation powerhouse here in Camtasia.
That's the one thing that we are missing right now. Text animations. Anyway,
thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Let me know
in the comments what you think about this. Are you going to use this at
all? I think I'm going to use it on some stuff, but it's very easy to overdo it,
right? It is very easy to just add these bars all over the place with no particular purpose.
So, let know what you think about this and thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one.