Hello, this is Cristi. Camtasia 2021 introduced support for LOTTIE
files. LOTTIE files are a kind of JSON file that
is animated, so they are vector, they are scalable and animated files. A little bit
like SVG on steroids, because the instructions in the file actually describe the objects
that go in there, the colours, the shapes and everything is vector, so it can be scaled
at any size, without loss in quality and also it can be animated.
And LOTTIE files, they've been created initially in Adobe AfterEffects, so you can go to Adobe
AfterEffects and use a plugin to create these animations and export them to this JSON format
called LOTTIE. This file format is now supported in Camtasia.
So, for a long a time, users of Camtasia have requested more advanced animation functions,
and ability to animate maybe characters or other things in Camtasia, and Camtasia has
always been a bit behind in terms of animation. All the animation you can do in Camtasia is
pretty much linear. You can't really do very complex stuff and this is a good and welcome
new feature that was added in Camtasia 2021, the ability to import these LOTTIE files.
So where can you get LOTTIE files? Well, you can go to websites such as LottieFiles.com
and you can see here there's a lot of animations that you can download.
There are free animations and also there is like a marketplace and some of them are paid,
you can buy some of them and you can browse these, you can search and find something that
maybe you can use in your project, like a Subscribe button or something like that, or
maybe a nice animation. It's a little bit like animated clipart, if
you want. There is also software - open-source and paid
- that you can use to create your own LOTTIE files.
So let me demonstrate how these work now in Camtasia.
I'm going to take this animation here with this rocket and I'm going to download it.
You need a free account on LottieFiles.com for example, you need a free account and you
can download these ones that say free here. I'm just going to download this one.
Before you download you can preview the animation and you can pause it and see how long it is
and everything else, and you can download it or you can convert it to a GIF. I'm not
going to do that so I'm just going to download this JSON file.
After you download this file, it's on your disk as a JSON file, and you can open it with
notepad and it looks like this. So it's all parameters and instructions and shapes, definitions
and everything else like this. So let's see how this works in Camtasia.
I'm going to drag this on top of Camtasia and import it. So I have Camtasia 2021 open
here, I'm just going to drag this file into my media bin.
And there you go, you can see already the animation that was included in the preview
on the website and now you can just add it to your project, to your canvas, just like
any other video clip. On the timeline, if you look, the duration
is about 4-5 seconds, I believe depending on how long and how many things are being
animated here. It's the duration is changeable. So let's play this.
So there you go, you can see the animation is playing just as the preview and this behaves
just like any other clip. If you want, you can group it, you can extend
frames, you can cut it and make it shorter if you want, or you can apply visual effects
to it. Let me just add a stupid effect to it like a colorize, there you go, it changes
the colour and you can play with it just like any other video clip in your timeline.
And you can use this as a clipart, like an illustration and because they are vector files,
they are scalable to any size. If I zoom out here and just make this completely
huge, you will notice, if I get closer to the file here, there is no loss in quality,
maybe Camtasia previews this a bit slowly, but actually this is a vector file, so there
will be no loss in quality. And also, it is transparent, so you can actually
put it on top of other objects. I'm just going to play with this a little
bit, I'm going to import a photo here of the moon, and scale this like that, place it on
my canvas and this clip with the animation is going to go on top of that. Put the moon
in here and you can see it's actually transparent and it plays. You can rotate this.
So you can create some nice animations like this and play with them and they will just
work like this. So, this was a very quick overview of this
new function, new compatibility that was added in Camtasia 2021, support for LOTTIE files.
Head over to lottiefiles.com or any other site that provides these or go and make your
own. I may actually cover in another video with some software that you can use to generate
these, and as you can see they are much more complex and they can be used just like any
other video clip to make your animations more interesting and your presentations or tutorials,
whatever you're doing in Camtasia. Thank you for watching. Let me know if you
have any questions about this video in the comments, and if you don't have Camtasia 2021
yet, if you haven't upgraded, I think it's worth upgrading and you'll find a link in
the description. If you click on it, it's an affiliate link and you'll be supporting
my channel without an extra cost to you. Thank you again for your time, see you next time!