Hey, this is Cristi. Welcome to another Techsmith Camtasia tutorial. In today's one I'm going to
show you a workaround to a problem that many users of Camtasia have expressed,
the inability to add outline to a text. So if you want to have a text on screen that has
just the outline and no fill, then this video is for you because I'm showing a way to do it.
It involves creating a special effect on the text and we can make it customizable
so that you can use this with any text you want, at any size you want,
and it's going to work pretty much the same way, and without having to bring
in texts from outside, exported with transparent PNGs or any other things.
So if you are looking for a way to create outline only text in Camtasia
I'm going to show you how to do it. This is Camtasia 2021, by the way. And let's start.
So we are here in a new project in Camtasia, and I would like to just type a text, I'm going to
Annotations on the left and I'm going to just use a simple text. You can use this one or this one.
And I like to use this one because it's kind of large. And I'm going to just change the
size to make it very, very large, maybe 500 or so. I think this is the maximum you can
get anyway. And to make the effect more visible, I'm going to make it
bold, so I'm going to go to bold here, and of course we want to make this one be an outline.
So to start, I'm going to just go to the corner here and just enlarge this area, because that
allows me to maybe make this larger. I know 500 is the maximum, but if you use different fonts,
it may actually be larger. So you can change to any font,
it doesn't matter, and also this works, if you want to change the font later,
don't get stuck on the font right here. I'm just going to actually leave it to Montserrat for now,
with bold. Right? This is how we're going to do this. We want to have the text see-through, but
we want to see the outline in white or any color you want to change, it doesn't really matter.
So let me show you how to do this. Basically what we are doing, because Camtasia doesn't allow you
to specify no fill for a text and put a different kind of outline to the text so you can see through
it, we're going to actually use a trick, involving a few copies of this text and a Track Matte.
I'm going to double click and replace this with TEXT because it's important to have corners where
you can anchor yourself to them. So I'm going to just call this one TEXT, but at the end we
can just change the text to anything we like. And here's the trick. We're going to make this text
sort of opaque a little bit so we can see through it a little bit like that.
So I'm going to make exactly eight copies of this text, right? In addition to this
main one that I have here. I know it sounds like it's a lot, but believe me,
it's going to work and it's going to give you the effect you want. So the principle behind
this is that we will make copies of this text and each copy is going to be offset by a few pixels.
So we will offset it to the top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left and then left, right,
top and bottom. We're going to offset this by the same amount. Each copy's going to be offset by
the same amount of space. And finally, I'm going to show you how to make it an outline from that.
So I'm going to zoom in my timeline here and let's call this track.
It's very easy and it's nice to stay organized by renaming your tracks.
So I'm going to call this MAIN text. Okay. And then I'm going to copy this,
and my playhead is at the start which makes it easier to paste in the same position.
And I'm going to paste this four times for now, and I'm going to paste it four more times later.
So let's call, let's go to the second one and let's call this one
LEFT. Okay. That's on the left. I'm just going to offset this to the left. Select this text
and you know, don't move your play head, don't do anything, and zoom in. You can hold the CTRL key
on Camtasia and zoom, you know, hold the cursor to sort of in the corner and zoom in to that point.
Don't actually do this when you have the text selected. So I'm going to undo that. So if you
hold the mouse in the corner and use your mouse wheel. You're going to zoom into that place. Okay.
So I'm going to hide all the other tracks because they're making my text be too white. And this one
here, the second one, the left one, I'm going to use the keyboard to move it to the left. So
I'm going to hold down SHIFT key and press left. One, two, one, just maybe one. Okay. Let's one.
And maybe without the shift key 1, 2, 3. Okay. So one shift and one and a couple more
pixels to the left. It's important to do it the same distance with all of them,
because you will see why. It's going to give our outline the same width if we do this.
So I have shifted this text to the left one time with the shift key and about
three times without which, you know, the shift key makes text move, objects
with the keyboard arrow keys, it makes it move faster. I have moved this one.
I'm going to hide it now. Go to the next one. Let's call this one, RIGHT.
Okay. So this means I'm going to turn it on,
click on it and it's now selected. So I'm going to hold down the shift key one and then 1, 2, 3,
or so just, you know, you can even eyeball this. If you're zoomed in far enough,
it's not going to make a huge difference. So this is my right text. Hide this one for now.
Unhide the next one and double click and call this one TOP. So okay. Select it. Shift key, up, 1, 2,
3. We have you know, moved it up a bit. If you zoom in some more, you can actually see what I'm
doing here. So the main text still stays there, but the other texts are being offset. Finally,
let's move to the last one and hide this one, and double-click and call this one BOTTOM. And
then click on it and shift key down. 1, 2, 3, sort of like this three or four. It's fine. So we have
done the top, bottom, left and right. Now this is going to give us a bit of trouble when we show all
of them, because you can see now the corners are not precisely covered. So what we want to do is
we want to copy these again, four more times and duplicate them in the corners too. That's what we
will do now. So I'm going to copy the first one, just the first one, because that's in the original
position. Right? So copy that one, copy and go to the paste it again. If you keep your play head in
the same position, it's going to create a new track and paste your object onto that track.
I know it sounds like we're having a lot of tracks here, so just bear with me because this is going
to pay off at the end. Now, this is going to be like, let's call this TOP LEFT. Okay. Let's go
clockwise, top left, all right. So click on this object, it's selected now, hold down the shift key
and move it one to the top. One to the left. You can even look closely and notice that I'm
actually matching it with the left and the top, which are now visible to just close the corner
properly. Okay. Let's copy again the main one, paste it. Let's call this one top right.
Click on it and use the arrow keys to just move it out until it matches with the other two. Move
it to the right and move it to the top. You notice how the corner becomes sharp again.
Okay. Another one, let's copy this one, another one. So this is going to be bottom right now.
Right, now again, use the shift key or just use the arrow keys, and you know, if you're zoomed
in close enough, you will see it. It's quite accurately moving it. And finally, let's paste one
more, and call this one bottom left. We won't need these names anyway, at the end when we are done.
So select this one again, use the shift key or arrow keys and just move that into place bottom.
Move it to the bottom and move it to the left until you have a perfect corner
there. All right now, select everything and turn the opacity all the way up. And now you see,
you're pretty much perfect on the corners here. It's a little bit,
it may be a little bit off. So if the top left, for example is not very precise,
you can just select on it and move it one pixel at a time until it shows perfectly.
Bottom left, again, seems a little bit off, click on it and move with the arrow key until you cover
that corner. Now look at my text here. You can't really see much difference here, except maybe
the ones that have slanted corners, like the X. Letter X here. But really this will not be
visible in the end anyway. So this is the final step for our outline text.
I'm going to select everything except for the bottom track, which is my main text. So
just control key and click on that to remove it from the selection. So I have all of my tracks
selected with all of my texts. Control G to create a group like this. All of my offset
texts are inside of that group, and my main text is at the bottom there.
I'm going to move my main text track to the top. This is no longer left now
because I've grouped everything, so I can just rename this one OUTLINE.
The names don't really matter. You can rename the group or whatever you want to do. You'll be
able to add this to your library at the end and reuse this in your projects, anytime you like.
So now, here's the effect because we want this to be see-through. So now we want to take out
the fill. So remember, that's why we kept the main text, because we need to make that
be the mask, the transparency that pokes a hole into this and makes it see through.
To do that I'm going to import a video clip just so you can see the
effect. So I'm going to just drag a video clip from my hard drive.
Okay. So I have a video clip here on my timeline that I imported. I'm going to move that all the
way to the bottom. You can see my text is not see-through yet, so that's fine. So let's see
how we can do, I'm going to zoom back into my text and I'm going to click on the main text.
You can see what the main text does now, because if I change the color, now you can see it's green
and it has the white outline that I've created by offsetting all of those layers of text. Right?
So now I don't want this to be green actually, I want it to see, to be see-through. So we will
use a feature that was added in Camtasia 2021, the Media Matte effect. So we go to Visual effects. If
you don't see it just click more, Visual effects down here and then go and find Media Matte.
Drag it on to the original text. Okay. By default, the effect applied by the Media Matte is Alpha,
so you're going to see only what's inside of that text, but if you go to the Properties
on the right change to Alpha invert, and there you go. This now shows everything
that is outside of that text. Right? So my text is now see-through. I have an outline.
If I play the video, you can see video through it and you can do whatever you
want with this text. Now, let me show you, this is another feature from Camtasia 2021,
you can select both of these things, the group with the offset texts and the main text that
has become the mask now. Control G to group them again, and you have one reusable asset.
You have all the texts down here on the right, which you can change because we have many copies
of it. So, because we don't want to actually have to change it like nine times or something, every
time we want to change the text, you can click on the properties here for the custom properties,
which apply to this group that the text is in and click on this little icon here to open the Quick
Property Editor, and in here you can actually link these fields together so that they all
change in sync. So just click this icon next to each one at the bottom there,
and you see, you can link them together into a single text field. Click Save.
And now you only change one text. Let's call it City. I'm just replacing this, City.
There you go. My text changes. It's still an outline text,
it still works. So you can animate this, you can, you know, you can add an animation to it. Like,
you know, you go here and you use a custom animation and you drag that on here,
you make it longer, maybe you can use the control key to zoom it in. And there you go.
The animation is playing just fine because your text is now transparent.
Yes. If you zoom in, you can notice these little corners here that, you know,
they are because we are, we only duplicated that like eight times, but I doubt that it's,
anybody's going to notice, you know this, so you can use this to create fancy effects,
like you know, you just offset a bit like that. You know, when you go,
you go in there and you just keep on pasting it and you create a little
Doppler effect or whatever you want to create with this text like that. It's all cool.
So just to show you, you can also change the font if you want, if you don't care for the
Montserrat font that I created there. So you can just click on this group here and you have all
of the font properties exposed through the quick properties. Click on that, change something else.
I've changed it here to Garamond. You can change it to something else that, you know, sometimes
Camtasia doesn't apply all the fonts. I don't know why, to all the annotations, so you need to find a
font that's supported and there you go. I changed it here. You can change it to bold or regular.
That's not going to make a much more difference now because we're just working with the outlines
and you can change the size, you can change the color as well, so that's going to, you know,
that's going to apply that to your to your text right here while keeping it with the outline.
So this is one way to create outline text in Camtasia. I know it's a little workaround, but
if you absolutely must have outline text and make it animated and native to Camtasia and changeable
and customizable and all those things, this is one way to do it until TechSmith introduces outline to
text in Camtasia. Until then, I hope this works and helps you in your projects.
Let me know if you enjoy this. If you haven't upgraded to Camtasia,
there's a link in the description there. If you click it and upgrade you will be supporting my
channel, that's an affiliate link, and I would appreciate it very much at no extra cost to you.
And thank you for watching my videos. If you enjoy them and
like them, share them. And if you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. And
now I have a Facebook group with help for Camtasia beginners. If you want to join it,
the link is in the description as well, and I will be responding to questions there,
answering questions personally. So thanks again for your time. See you on the next one.