Hello, this is Cristi. Today, I'd like to talk to you about a new feature introduced in Camtasia
2022. You need 2022.1 to have this feature and it is called, Blur Region. It's a new effect
that you can apply to any clip on your canvas in your project and apply a blur to a region.
Why is this important, you say, because there is already a blur annotation in Camtasia? Well,
there is, but let me show you what the difference is.
First of all, if you needed to blur a region in your video, like the video that I have here on the
screen, you had to go to Annotations, you go to this special section and use this Blur annotation.
You introduce that onto your canvas right there on top of the video, you resize it,
and then there you go, you have a blurred area. I blurred this chart.
Now this disadvantage of this version is that you, the intensity is not very strong.
The intensity right now is about a hundred and I can kind of still see what's behind.
The second thing is, if you look in the bottom-left on my timeline, you will
see that this annotation occupies a separate track in my project. So I'm wasting a track.
And the biggest disadvantage that I always struggled with is if you need to animate or move
this video clip, the blur annotation, doesn't go with it, doesn't resize, doesn't move. So
if I move the clip, look, my area that I blurred comes out from underneath. So it becomes visible.
So there, if I need to animate my clip, like maybe I need to zoom in or out,
I have to add an animation to the clip and another
one to the blur region and make sure it stays on top of the area always.
So if I wanted to resize this, I have to select both of them and go to Animations, go to a Custom
animation and drag one there. So if I have, because I have both selected, it's going to
add an animation to both tracks, and then I resize like this. So if you're on a previous version of
Camtasia, you have to do this. You cannot use this Blur Region effect, and this is how you
resize a blur to stay together with your clip. So right now, you can see the blur gets resized.
No more because this new effect,
let me remove this old blur right there. This new effect is actually much better,
and it's integrated on the object that you apply it to. It's just like an effect, right?
So if I want to go to the blur, this area, this chart on my object, I go to Visual effects now
and you find it right there, Blur Region. You drag that onto your clip. By default,
it kind of gets added in the middle of your object. So if I resize this,
you will see now that the blur effect is resized with the clip.
No matter what I do, the blur effect is resized and it's animated as well. So you can grab this
handle in the middle, it's a little fiddly in Camtasia 2022. They haven't quite got
the handles right yet. So if you grab the center, you can move the blur to the area
you require. And these very, very tiny corner handles allow you to resize it right there.
So now I have blurred my entire chart. So as I was saying,
if I now grab the clip on the timeline, you see there's no extra track being
used by this blur effect. And I resize my clip, the blur goes with it. Right?
Another nice cool thing about this new effect is that you
can also apply various object options to it.
I can add a tint. So by default, it's white, but if I want to make this green,
you see my blurred area is green because I've chosen the color green. So it's like applying
frosted glass kind of effect to your image.
You can control the opacity of the object so you can make it fully,
which is not really a blur, but you know, fully opaque.
And you can also adjust the blur to a much, much stronger level. So if you see here,
it's 150, but if I blur even more, it will blur very, very seriously,
up to 1000. That's the top margin, top limit of the blur effect. So the
intensity right now is so strong, you can't even tell what was behind the blur itself.
And you can of course, change the shape to an oval or a rectangle. You can rotate that,
okay. And you can also have rounded corners on it. And an effect I really like,
is the feathering. You can now make the feathering edges either inside or outside,
so you can turn the feather from minus 100 to plus 100.
So this was, again, something you didn't have with the previous blur annotation.
And this is quite nice if you're trying to create a sort of a vignette effect. So let
me show you. I have a video here on my timeline with some flowers. If I apply the blur region
effect to this, you will see, by default, it just puts it in the middle there. It doesn't matter.
But I can move this so right there, and let me resize it. You see, it's quite fiddly
to grab the corners. Maybe it's my screen resolution too high, I don't know. So you
can also actually go all the way to the edge of your clip to make it covered completely.
So this is a nice thing. You can have the feather applied inside or outside. Of course,
you can't see it if it's on outside and it's all the way to the edges, but what's very nice is, you
can also invert the effect, the blur. So now only the area outside of this effect is blurred. By
increasing the feather quite a lot. I have created a very nice blurred edges. And for example, you
can make it black. You can give the blur a black color and you turn the opacity higher and you make
the corners a bit rounded. And what you have is a very nice vignette effect. You can of course,
tweak the feather some more, or you can invert it and you can have like a frosted glass tinting
kind of thing. By changing the color, you can really make it seem like it's part of the image.
So, you know, quite a lot of options there for very nice, also artistic effects, not
just blurring regions and making them, you know, hiding private information or that sort of thing.
So, I kind of like this, and I think I'll be using this one from now on,
because it's much, much more powerful and it gives you much more options.
If you remember, some of my videos from the past,
I was creating sort of like a depth of field, fake lens, depth of field effect. This one,
I can see this one working very well for that, particularly because you can feather it,
you can increase the blur and then rotate it to give you those nice little angles.
So it just looks like a camera kind of depth of field blur.
Another thing is, you can also animate this effect. So if I add an animation to my clip
right there, on this one, with the flowers, I add an animation. Shift and A, and you at the end of
the animation, I can maybe change the opacity to be completely opaque and maybe the blur.
And then now, you can see the animation is changing it so I can even change,
I believe I can change the color. Let me see if that actually works. So it starts out as
a black one and it becomes purple. There you go. So you can animate this. You can
also animate the position, the size, all those things. You can animate them on this object.
So on this effect, even the feather, so I can make it disappear gradually in my video.
So there you have it, very nice. Thank you Techsmith for adding this. There are some
features in there that were different requests from different users, like the feathering and the
also the intensity, which was, you know, very nice to have now.
So thank you for watching. I have more videos about the new features announced
this week by Techsmith and I will be making separate videos for those and
showing you how I was doing things before and how you can do them now.
And there's a very nice one there that's been requested for ages by a lot of people.
So if you enjoyed this video, feel free to like it, share it,
subscribe to my channel and I will see you on the next one.