Hello, this is Cristi. Let me show you a quick Camtasia tip for storing and reusing
effect stacks or even cursor effect stacks in Camtasia. If you find yourself always
using kind of the same cursor effects or clip effects on specific clips,
maybe after you record your screen, and you don't want to have to add them
all the time again and again, and again, let me show you how you can reuse those.
So I have a screen recording here and it's on the timeline and I have my mouse
cursor here. You can see it moving. And let's suppose that you always want to add a bunch of
cursor effects. So you don't want to forget and you go to Cursor effects and you may add maybe
a Cursor highlight to your clip.
Then maybe you can go to the left click and add the rings for the left click.
Maybe you add a click sound as well. You can see,
as I add them, they appear on the sidebar in the right side, on the Properties panel.
And let's go to the right-click, I'm just going to add right-click rings as well to the same clip.
So now I'm moving my playhead, and you can see my cursor is highlighted and it's doing all these
things that I have added on the right side. Well, let's suppose that you change your options here.
Maybe you change the volume of the mouse click and for the rings, maybe for the highlight, you make
it larger and you make it a different colour, I don't know, let's try purple or pink or something.
Okay. So these are the effects that I added to my video, and I want to always use these effects on
all of my screen recordings. And I don't want to have to remember to add them all the time,
personalize them. Yes, you can create presets using these plus signs here on the sidebar,
but these don't actually create an effect stack, so you can apply all of them at the same time.
Well, you can actually do that. If you go to your clip on the timeline when you're done with this,
you right-click and you say convert to placeholder. So there you go.
My recording disappears, but if you look in the sidebar on the right side,
you have all of your effect stacks still applied with all the preferences and the colour I chose.
So now you can add this to your library. I'm just going to add it to my library,
right-click on this placeholder. It doesn't matter what duration it has. I'm going to show you why.
Actually, in fact, before adding it to Library, I'm just going to make it much, much shorter.
Just like this, maybe two minutes. It doesn't really matter how long it is.
I'm going to right-click on this and add it to my Library now.
And I'm going to call it Mouse Effects Stack. Just a suggestive name. So use the canvas size.
Click OK. And there you go. It's right there in my Library.
Now I'm going to create a new project. Everything is gone, all is scrapped,
and what I'm going to do is, I'm going to bring in another screen recording right there.
You can see my screen recording, and I also have a webcam by the way, on this recording.
I'm just going to place that on the timeline and delete my camera. And here's my recording.
Now, how do I bring that effect stack back in here? No problem. Go to your Library,
bring your mouse effects stack placeholder on the timeline right there. And now, it doesn't matter
if it's longer or shorter than your clip. And now click on your recording and drag it on top of your
placeholder until the outline of the placeholder becomes green. Release your mouse, and now
Camtasia is asking you, what do you want to do? And what I want to do is, ripple replace, which
will make room for your clip in that placeholder and stretch it as far as it needs to go.
So let's choose Ripple replace. There you go. The placeholder has now disappeared.
My clip has replaced the placeholder. The duration was maintained from the clip. And now watch this.
If I go around my mouse cursor has the pink highlight. And if I go on the right side,
I see all of my effects stack already applied and customized, ready to go
for the entire duration of my screen recording.
So that's how you can do it. And you can do this with a lot of other effects. The placeholder will
remember all those things. You save them to your library and you can reuse them anytime, just by
dragging this on top. So I hope this was useful. If you find these quick tips with Camtasia useful,
feel free to subscribe to my channel and I will see you on the next one.