Hello, this is Cristi. In today's Camtasia tutorial we will look at how we can create a
time lapse animation in Camtasia. And I don't mean animating objects designed in Camtasia,
but if you shoot photos, you know, in a time-lapse fashion,
take different photos of some action with your camera and bring them all into your computer,
I want to show you how you can assemble those into an animation.
And there's a little bit of configuration to be done, but then it's very easy and I'm going to
show you how to do this. If you have the photos already, and I have a bunch of photos here,
I went into Google Maps and I took some photos of the Eiffel tower and I just saved one photo
for each frame like this and, you know, kind of jumps around and you can see that
I'm sort of spinning around the Eiffel tower and these are the photos I'm gonna use.
And let me show you how you can import these automatically into Camtasia. Camtasia
does not have the ability to import a sequence of images. And in this case,
you actually don't really need that because Camtasia doesn't convert image sequences to video.
But you don't really need that. You just need all these images imported in order
on your Camtasia timeline, and then you can apply effects and, you know, move them around and so on.
So let's have a look at how we can achieve this. So in Camtasia, before you even import these
images, you need to change one setting. It's found in the edit menu in the Preferences and you go to
Timing and we need to change the setting called Images timing for images is by default,
I think it's three seconds or five seconds. I'm not really sure what the default is. You may have
a different value here. What this setting does, is it controls how many settings or
how long every image you import in Camtasia will last by default. Of course you can change that,
but by default, this is going to be a time-saver when we bring the images in. And what I was
saying about adding the images as a sequence, Camtasia doesn't do that. It doesn't convert the
sequence of images into video automatically, like some other software can do, because then
things like, if you have a video that's 30 frames per second and you have 30 seconds,
30 images, you know, it won't convert that into a second of video.
It doesn't do that, but it does import a sequence of images, which we can use
in time lapse because in timelapse you don't really need them to be a 30 frames per second,
30 images per second, that would be too fast. A timelapse animation moves a little slower. So,
in here the minimum you can set is 0.1 seconds. So that is not so much. So if I put 0.01 already,
I can't do it, but I can do 0.1. This is the minimum, which means you'll get like 10 frames
in a second so to speak. So I'm going to set this to the minimum here because I want my animation to
spin around quite fast. You you're free to, to put a higher value, but that's going to give you
slower videos, slower changes between the frames, OK? So I'm going to leave
it at 0.1 for my project. So let's click OK here and now let's bring the images.
So the way to do this is just to select all of them and you can actually drag all
of them onto your media bin, or you can drag them straight into your timeline,
just drop them in here. It may take a while for them to appear and look, they are in the Media
bin, but they are also in the timeline and you can see that, you know 28 images or so, they
should last me about three seconds. But look at how close they are to each other, because of
that setting that I changed, it made the frames, the seconds for each frame or each image quite
short. So if I want to see what's going on here, I can just zoom in. So I'm going to hold down
the Control key and zoom in. There are my images, they're all selected by default, so if you want to
move them around, just grab one of them, doesn't matter which one and move it to the beginning.
Now let's see what we've achieved so far. My project is I believe HD,
if not you can go to the Settings here and go to Project settings and it is indeed 1080p HD,
which is great. Apply that. Well, I have 30 frames per second here, and that means if I want my video
to be kind of slower, I can also change this to 25, or I can make it faster and go to 60.
It's up to you, I'm going to leave it alone for now. Click Apply here and now let's play this.
Okay. So my video is working, you know, I'm spinning around here with the,
with the play head. Everything's good. But what I don't like is that because I took screenshots
of Google Maps in Google Earth, I have this search bar here that I could not disable,
and I have these controls over to the right side.
So what I want to do is I want to crop these out, but I don't want to do that on a frame by frame,
but that would be taking a lot of time. So what you can do is, in Camtasia, this is really cool,
you can select all of these images and group them. So Control G will create a group like that from
all of my images and now I can move them around my own, you know, I can, I can do stuff with it.
I can even crop this group. So if I want to crop, I can go to the top bar here and, you know,
or hold down the Alt key to crop my group and the group now behaves like a little video clip. So
every crop operation I do in here, I can even add effects to this group, they will all apply
to every single image inside of the group, right? Because they are treated as part of a single clip.
So what I want to do is I want to click on this group and press down the ALT key.
You notice it's changing into Crop mode, hold it down, and then pull these handles,
you know, you may see them a little cause they're tiny. Pull these handles,
like for example, the one on the top, pull it down until I've, I've gotten rid of that bar.
And then from the right side,
I need to just find where it is, here it is. I can pull it to the left to get rid of that,
and then the bottom part, I can find it and move it up. Until I got rid of that, or if I want to
get rid of the bit on the left too, I can maybe drag the left side as well in here. So look,
my video now has removed all those things and it still works because every frame is cropped.
Right? So look, this is my video now. I don't like that it doesn't fill the screen anymore, so I can
just move it around and then resize it, like this not holding down the ALT key anymore. And
if I have a black bar here, then maybe I can go in and fix the aspect ratio a little bit. So I can,
maybe I can see that I have a slightly more to the left there so I can push the left side until the
bottom matches and then press the Alt key and just tuck that bit in there, just cut it out.
And now my video is full HD, covers the entire screen, and I got rid of the corners. Now,
of course your situation with the time-lapse might be different, so you know, you may need
to crop or not, that is up to you. But look, my video is already quite okay. It's playing quite
nicely and I have made sure that when I grabbed this, I actually went one full circle around.
So here's another trick, I can actually copy and repeat this, but before I do,
if you want to adjust the video in any way, maybe the lighting wasn't so good. So like for example,
these ones that I captured on Google Maps to me, they look a little de-saturated and
they don't really have much contrast. So I want to adjust that before I make copies of this.
So I am now still in this single group here and I can go to maybe
Visual Effects, and of course you can use Color adjustment or Color tint, and you can make stuff,
you know, add these effects just to your clip and it will affect all the images. So for example,
let's do Color adjustment. I'll just drag that in here. By default, it has this weird, full
contrast thing. I don't know why they do this, but anyway, you can pull that down here. Pull the
contrast down and then bring the saturation back in. So I'm kind of in the same place as before,
but I can now tweak maybe the contrast a little more, you know, the brightness and the saturation.
Look, you can bring the saturation up and make it look more interesting.
And every frame will be affected by this setting. I'm not crazy about this, so I'm
going to take this off and I'm going to, I'm actually going to use some LUTs. If you remember
at the end of June, Camtasia, TechSmith introduced LUTs, 3D LUTs support in Camtasia 2021.
So there's this color LUT here, I can apply to my group again, and I can use some of these groups.
The groups, the LUTs that I have here are from RocketStock, and I think you can get other LUTs
somewhere else, but these ones are the ones that I imported here. By default,
Camtasia only comes with this one, Enhanced Contrast, but you can use any of these ones,
you know, like, look at this, this looks like a retro photo. I kind of like this one.
So you can, you can control the intensity of your LUT effect right here. So look, my entire clip
actually looks quite nice and retro, it's like a retro photo. Again, you can combine these effects
and if I still want to do color adjustment, I can just add that on top. And of course it's again,
ridiculously exaggerated, so I'm going to, you know, you can even make it black and white,
if that's what you're going for. So here we go. You know, I'm just showing you
how you can correct color and saturate it and, you know, I guess it looks OK. So there you go.
So now, my animation is working. It only goes around one time, so what I want to do now is
just make copies of this. Control C on my group, go to the end here and Control V to paste it.
It may take a while because,
all those images, they need to be re-added onto the timeline for every one of these groups. So
that may be time consuming. So it depends on what you want to do with these, and how many times you
want to copy this, I'll put them all in the same track here and paste it a couple more times.
You can zoom out, here we go, four times I've copied it. You can see that already my machine is
kind of struggling. So if you're doing this, you know, with a long project, maybe break it apart
into different bits, smaller parts. So let's see. My effect now is playing fine,
it's going around, you can't even see where it stops and starts again.
It's quite seamless because I've done a full revolution on this thing. So yeah,
this works now, you know, you can feel free to add annotations, you know, and add some text,
all right. So you can do whatever you like with this, you know,
just feel free. This is going to just behave like a normal video clip on your canvas, right here.
There we go. So I have a little title here for my, whatever I'm doing with this Paris thing, anyway.
This was it. You can import the images into Camtasia, create a time,
you know, a time-lapse animation, you can export that to video, just going to the Export menu,
local file or whatever you want to do. Don't forget to save it.
If you have too many images, Camtasia may crash on you. So make sure you save it,
you know, before you move on to the stages and yeah, this is it.
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments and thank you for watching.
I hope this tutorial was useful. I have many more Camtasia tutorials coming up
and feel free to subscribe to my channel, if you enjoy these and,
remember to join my Facebook group. I have a new Facebook group for Camtasia for
Help for Beginners. The link is in the description again and you know, feel free to join there and I
will be personally answering questions in there. So thanks again for watching. See you next time.