Hello, this is a quick workaround in Camtasia to straighten a video clip.
And if you use in Camtasia, the Cropping tool and the Rotation tool, it still doesn't leave
you with a straight video.
It will just put the corners out of the canvas and so on.
So let me show you how to crop it properly.
I have this video clip here and let's suppose that the video is slanted.
For example, I'm going to just silence the audio on this clip and let's assume that my
clip is not very straight, so maybe I want to straighten it out so that the horizon line
is straight.
That would mean that if I go on the Rotation and I turn the rotation a bit like this, I
want to make that straight, so maybe I want to use as a guideline or even I just put it
down at the bottom here.
So let's suppose that this video is not too straight, I'm going to rotate it.
You can also use the precise rotations by placing the cursor inside of the Z-axis box
and just use the arrow keys up and down.
And let's suppose that I want to straighten it like this.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I'm going to assume this is the correct position of
the video.
Now watch this.
You can see the video kind of going out of the canvas.
There's not enough video here, I can see the corners.
So one thing to do is to basically just resize the video, scale it up, using the control
key to scale it proportionally.
You've scaled it now, but look, the video is actually kind of going out of the canvas
and I don't really like that.
Method number one, to work around this, if your video doesn't need to change or rotate
at all, you can just group the video with itself.
So with the video clip selected, press Control G to group it with itself.
This is possible in Camtasia 2021 and 2020.
Or you can right-click on it and say, Group.
This is going to create a group that is cropped to the canvas.
Watch this, the video clip is playing.
It of course it's not straight, but that's not what I'm trying to prove here.
And you can see all of the areas around the clip don't actually show up anymore because
the video is inside the clip.
One thing that this doesn't do is, if you animate this inside of the group, then it's
going to kind of move it around.
And if the clip is actually smaller than the canvas, this is still going to work.
If you resize this, look, it looks like the clip has been cropped.
Another method to fix this is, let me undo this.
Now you see it.
It's going outside of the canvas again.
So the second method to fix that is to go to Annotations and go to Shapes and use a
rectangle.
Draw a rectangle on your canvas and make sure the rectangle fills the entire canvas or the
entire area that you want to cover with your video.
You maybe want to make it a little bit less, you know, a bit transparent, just so you see
where the video is when you're done, push it up, go to the Visual effects now and use
the Media Matte.
Make sure the rectangle spans the entire duration of your video, and use the media matte on
this rectangle like this.
Again, you can see it has cropped it to the size of that rectangle.
The beautiful part of this is that if you want to change the cropping, all you have
to do is select that rectangle and resize it to whatever you want it to be, move it
around.
And that mask you created will move with it.
So if you want your clip to just play here, you can have it there.
You know the clip is still playing.
So this rectangle behaves like a mask and it doesn't matter what is outside of this
rectangle, because it's not going to be visible due to the mask.
Again, if you want to have this thing in a single object, so you can move it easily.
Select both of them and control G to group them.
And now everything is a single object.
The nice part of this is that you can still control the cropping.
If you go inside of the group by opening the group, click on your rectangle and you can
change the cropping while the video clip stays in there, like that.
So there you have it, two ways to straighten and crop a video clip in Camtasia without
using the crop tools and rotation tools in Camtasia, which don't actually crop to a straight
vertical line.
Thank you for watching.
If this video was useful please feel free to like it and subscribe to my channel.
I have many more Camtasia tutorials on my channel, and if you need any help or have
any questions, let me know in the comments.
Also feel free to join my Camtasia help group on Facebook, where I am personally answering
questions and helping everyone one-on-one.
Thanks for watching.
See you on the next one.