Hi everyone, Cristi here. Today, I have a treat for you, and it's one of those things
that I always struggled with until I came up with a solution in Camtasia,
the alignment and distribution of assets on the screen. So Camtasia doesn't come with
any sort of grids or guides or anything to help you arrange items on your screen.
So if you're using a 16:9 or a 4k screen or whatever, and you need to maybe put
some bullet points on the screen, or maybe you want to know what the safe margins are
or where should you put information so that it's nicely displayed and
it doesn't get into the way of something else, or it's not too close to the edges
or the distance is equal and all of those design decisions that you need to make.
So it's quite frustrating sometimes, when I have some videos that I edit
and then I have to maybe show five bullet points on the screen. Well, I have to start
from scratch every time I have to create one bullet point and then duplicate that and make
sure I have some kind of a distancer between them so that I know exactly where they sit.
So it's very frustrating when that is a very hard thing and it just gets you
out of the groove. When I made it in videos, I'm like, oh, now I need to stop and align things
properly and create a bunch of lines to help me guide. So I came up with a solution for this,
and I'm just going to show you today what I created and I hope you like it,
and if you need it, there's a link in the description to get it for yourself,
or you can do it the way that I built it, if you want to build them yourself.
So I created my own grids and guides for Camtasia.
So let me show you in this project. Just what I mean. So I have this project,
I am here on the screen and I don't really like to be in the middle of the screen.
Maybe I want to be on to the side because that's a bit more natural and it's you know, the eye
kind of gets drawn to that person on the screen. So normally, you would not want to have like a
speaker on the middle of the screen, unless you're like a news anchor or something. But anyway, you
know, usually the people recommend that you place, you know, things in thirds. So what is that,
thirds? The third rule is like you divide the screen into three vertically and horizontally
and in photography as well, you have the thirds. So you can actually use like eyeball it,
you're just approximate where you need to be. But what if you had a nice grid to show that?
So let me show you. This is what I did. I have in my library, a grid called 3x3, this is my thirds.
I drag it on my timeline down here, and you can see here I have the grid. So now I can actually
align myself right there where the thirds are. And then I can turn that off and there you go.
Very nice arrangement on screen. Now, what if I want to put on the screen like a lower-thirds,
create a lower-thirds on the bottom left of the screen, for example? lower-thirds,
again, it needs to be in the lower-third of the screen, obviously it's in the name.
So I turn on this grid, but how do I know what the safe margins are? And, you know, in video editing,
safe margins, they are just a portion around the screen where you should try not to put
any important content because it may be cropped maybe, or in different screen formats or whatever.
More used in television, I suppose, but you have the safe margin. So they are some,
you know, industry standard, whatever margins that you need to stay away from.
So I created that one too. So safe margins, I just bring that into my project down here
again on the timeline. There you go. if I turn off the lower-third, the third grid,
I have the safe margins now. So you notice my head is staying inside of that area,
if I'm displaying any logos, for example, so if I have a logo that I'd want to put
on the corner here, I can maybe go to my library and bring in my logo
here. Like this, avatar transparent, and I know that I need to place it right here in the corner,
just staying away from those margins. Don't place elements too close to the margins.
That is usually one of those things that when you have experience and you look at a video,
you watch a video or design or graphic or something, and then, you know,
things are not spaced evenly, or they're not spaced properly, you know, just have enough
room around them. That becomes a bit, you know, like, ah, this is very groaning, it's painful.
But if you have your safe margins, you know, not to go
into that corner too close to the edges. And for the lower-thirds, because I mentioned that,
if I'm creating a lower-thirds, obviously, I need to stay within these safe margins.
So there's different safe margins for widescreens, which is the green one here
that you see the first one, the outside. And then there's four by three margins, which was
the other area here, so if you expect your video to maybe play on a 4:3 screen without the
black margins around it, you will want to place content in here.
And you see this, usually on news shows where they put the time and the news tickers maybe,
and the name of people just inside this 4:3 area, although there's more room on the 16:9 screen,
there's more room on there, but sometimes that may not fit on certain screens.
So they keep the safe margins, you know, take those into consideration.
So if I want to do a lower-thirds here again, I need to stay away from this margin right here,
but I also need to stay in the lower-third. So I'm
just going to go and create a proof of concept, lower-thirds kind of thing,
so I'm just going to bring that in here and make sure I stay in that corner right there.
And also, if I enable the grid, you see, I have all this space here to stay within that. So that's
my lower-thirds down here, perfectly placed in the corner, the logo is here, and look,
when you turn these things off, everything is nice and pleasantly aligned because you have
had those lines, you know. And these grids that I created, I actually created more grids like this.
So if I go back Guides and Grids Library, you can download this by the way, and you
add it to your own library and you bring in, let's suppose that I want to add on screen
five bullet points. So that's the most painful thing for me,
usually when I have to do bullet points, I have to go to Annotations and
put this text in here and make sure I have enough room and align it and all that stuff. Okay.
So you design your bullet point let's suppose this is a bold one and I'm just going to
use 550 here and there you go. So that's one bullet point, right? But look at this, I mean,
how am I going to align this? But check this out, if I, bring in, let me just take these out for
a second, so if I want to put these five bullet points on screen, right, if I make a copy of this,
copy and paste it, and yes, you can align it horizontally using the Camtasia snapping on
the canvas, which you can turn on by going to view, and you turn on Enable canvas snapping.
So that enables you to kind of snap onto other objects, and you can see here, these objects,
these bullet points, they have the same size, so they obviously match. If I make one smaller,
that, you know, you can still sort of align it on the left. But what about distancing
them equally? So I can kind of make copy and paste in your kind of approximate,
the distancing between them and I'll probably be pretty accurate in here.
So let's suppose, five bullet points. But if I look at them, I don't like them. They're
not evenly spaced and there is no alignment tool in Camtasia to say or distribute tool.
So if I select all of them, there is nothing in the menus to actually align things,
at least not to my knowledge, anyway, I don't, I haven't encountered any of that stuff.
But check this out. I'm going to bring in from my library, my 10x10 grid, for example.
Place this on your timeline, and usually, what you want to do is you want to have this on the topmost
track. So this is on the topmost track, and now you notice that my bullet points are nowhere near
equally distributed. But look what I can do. And this is a nice thing, if you bring this grid onto
your screen, you can actually lock that track, using the lock key on the track header. And you
can see now this grid is not editable anymore, I'm not running the risk of moving it by mistake.
But now, all of my text bullet points, they are still editable. And look, if I move them around,
they will snap to my grid. And the second one right here, the third one, you notice they snap
to all of these lines, horizontal or vertical, they snap to them, even though the grid is locked.
So look at this, perfectly aligned, perfectly distributed bullet points. If I hide this now,
look at that bullet points, very nicely distributed, and it can do this
horizontally as well if you need to have, you know, equal distance between things.
And this is another thing, I created these assets, these grids with the possibility to
customize them a little bit. So for example, if I have a background that is maybe green,
okay, so I have a green background maybe in this green doesn't work, because I can't see it.
It's not a problem, you just click on the grid item itself, you added it,
and on the right side here using the Quick Properties, you can change the color. So
let's suppose I want to have a blue grid or a red grid, you know, purple, whatever color that is,
orange. Any color you like, you can change it. And if it's hard to see, by the way, you can also
change the thickness of the lines so that they are more visible and the snapping works just as well.
So I've got a more grids in here that you can use. For example, you've got a 4x4 grid,
there you go, you just place it onto your canvas, onto your timeline,
it will align perfectly to the canvas, it's made to be full HD format 16:9,
and the distance between the lines is equal on all of them. So you've got 4x4, 3x3, 2x2,
safe margin grid, and I'm thinking of other grids to add in this collection.
And if you do go ahead and buy these, you'll get all of the ones that you see
in here and you will help support my work. They're not expensive, but they save you a lot of time. Of
course you can build them yourself if you like, it's nothing special in there, you can build them
and you customize them and you add them to your library and you can reuse them over and over.
And I'm actually thinking of creating more grids, if you have any ideas for different
grids or, you know, different alignments or divisions of the screen that you use,
I'm also thinking of adding maybe the golden ratio, for example, for having that particular
division of the screen with the different sectors that are natural and pleasing to the eye.
So lots of ideas there. I mean, this is saving me a lot of time right now because I no longer
have to guess, you know, the distance between the elements and hey you know, if Techsmith adds
grids and alignment and snapping and guides to the new version of Camtasia, that would be fantastic.
But until then, this is greatly useful for me in all my work. So I do hope you enjoy these. I hope
you like them and you find them useful. And if you would like to get them, there's a link in the
description there. And thanks very much for your support. And I will see you on the next video.