Hello everybody.
Thank you for joining me again.
In this Camtasia tutorial, I will show you how you can create more complex shapes from
basic shapes in Camtasia.
Maybe you need to create some more complex shapes, like some arrows or some tiny little
graphics for your projects, and you discover that Camtasia doesn't have them all in the
library of annotations and shapes.
So I'm going to show you in this video, how you can think about creating more complex
shapes from basic shapes that you can find in Camtasia so that you can keep your project
as close to native in Camtasia as possible without having to import graphics from external
sources.
So that can be easy because then you don't depend on external graphics, external images,
you don't need to run another program to just create a graphic or an image or a clip art
or kind of thing like that.
You can do this in Camtasia, but if you can imagine how you can create that graphic from
elemental shapes.
So what I'm showing you here, if you go to Annotation in Camtasia, you have these tabs
with the annotations here, and let's suppose I want to create a nice arrow.
If I go to the arrow section here, you only have a few and they're all like in a straight
line.
And if you go to the All there to see all the arrows, you can see that all the arrows
are pretty basic.
All you can change is maybe the start and the end of the arrow and change the back,
you know, the back of the arrow and a certain thing, you can change the colour and the shape
of the line itself, but that is pretty much all you can do.
So what if you wanted to create, say an arrow that is thinner at one end and thicker at
the other end, kind of like a cartoon arrow if you want.
Well, this is not included even in the shapes, if you go to the Annotations and go to Shapes
and enable style All, so you can see all of the annotations you have here.
This is pretty much everything you have.
You have squares and ellipses and stars and rectangles, a bunch of octagons or whatever
these are, and that is it.
You have triangles, of course.
Okay.
But there is no funny, quick, nice cartoony arrow.
Now, of course, you could go to a graphics program and create it in there, export it
as a PNG because by the way, Camtasia doesn't also support vector graphics, unless they
are LOTTIE files, which was introduced in 2021.
But apart from that, and of course, those are also created by other artists on Lottiefiles.com
or any other websites that sell LOTTIE files.
Apart from that, when you want to create your own graphics, you're kind of stuck.
So let me just show you a way to think about creating complex graphics or even simple graphics,
but from elemental graphics, and then combine them together into a native shape that you
can use and reuse in your projects.
So just let's think about this arrow that I told you, if you want to create an arrow
that is thinner at one end and thicker at the other end and has a nice pointy triangle
thing in the end, there you go.
I've said it.
You need to think about the shapes that kind of combine into creating that arrow and you
also need to think about using the Media Matte effect.
The Media Matte effect has been introduced in Camtasia 2021.
Before that in 2020, there was the Track Matte effect, which allows you to achieve the same
effect.
And what I'm showing you today is actually covered in a previous video that I did about
putting videos into irregular shapes.
In that video, I was showing the same kind of principle of combining and creating custom
shapes from the elemental shapes that come in with Camtasia.
So let's have a look at this arrow.
So what I want to do is actually combine the two ellipses or two circles to create the
tail of the arrow, and then I use a triangle for the head of the arrow.
So this is the way to do it.
Just go to the Annotation, go to Shapes and just take this circle here and put it on your
canvas.
Don't worry about the colour now, because this is something you can change later.
So let me make this larger.
Control and Shift key, drag one of the corners.
So this is my basic circle.
Now what I want to do is I want to create a nice rounded tail for this arrow.
So I'm going to make a copy of this, Control C, control V. Notice I'm not playing with
the play head yet, I'm not going in my video anywhere, I'm just playing with the shapes
now.
So I'm creating my own shape, like in a vector drawing program.
So this is my circle now.
I have a copy of it, let's make the copy green.
And this is, you know if you move it, look, you move it on one axis, you can also already
see this kind of thing, like the moon here.
This might be the tail of my arrow.
So what I can do is, let me turn this into black, just to illustrate what's going to
happen.
If I make this kind of black like this, kind of dark grey, we can now see how I can make
this shape kind of cover the other shape partially.
But what I want to do is I want to drag the edges like that, and distort this shape and
then just place it around here.
Maybe I've distorted it too much, let's make it, put it back in here for a bit.
And there we go, this is the tail of my arrow.
Okay, this is step number one.
So you can see the tail of my arrow, the yellow part there.
It's kind of, you know, thinner at one end and it grows and then it kind of becomes thick
again and thin again.
So if I rotate this a bit, you can play with it and kind of make your arrow thinner or
thicker like this.
So let's suppose I'm happy with the tail of the arrow.
But okay, how am I actually going to achieve the effect I want?
Because if I scale this, I actually have two shapes, so what I want to do is I, want to
use the Media Matte effect.
So what I'm doing is I'm going to apply the Media Matte effect on the dark ellipse.
And I'm going to use Alpha invert to cut out this shape from the shape in the bottom.
Let me show you what I mean, I go to the Visual Effects and Media Matte, this is it here.
Drag it onto the black circle or ellipse, like this.
So what happened now is because, by default, this effect actually applies Alpha, not Alpha
invert, which means it became a mask for the circle underneath on the track below.
But we don't want that, we actually want it to show me the area that is outside of it.
So what I want to do is go on the right side here on the Properties and change Alpha to
Alpha invert, like so.
If I click around to de-select, there's my arrow tail right there.
It's not finished yet, the arrow isn't finished, so what I need now is the arrowhead.
But this has become a single object like that.
If I group it, select both of them, the ellipse that cuts out from the other circle and group
them.
See, I have a single object now, which is the tail of my arrow.
You can also add ahead for the arrow and for this, I'm going to use a triangle.
So let's go back to Annotations and just drag any triangle onto the canvas, and let's change
the colour to match the other shapes.
So I'm going to just use the colour picker on the colour selector and go to the circle
there and click.
That's going to make the triangle the same colour.
And now, I'm going to just zoom in a bit here and rotate the arrowhead like this, place
it on the part that becomes thicker like that.
Maybe turn it around a bit and there you have it.
That is a nice arrow.
Again, you can now go and combine these two into another shape with the grouping.
Or I can go to the initial group, ungroup it, Control U and now select everything and
group it again to avoid creating too many groups.
So this is my shape, this is my arrow.
If you feel like the arrow is not pointing in the right direction or something, you can
of course go in the group, click on the triangle and just rotate it slightly.
You can resize it.
If it's not large enough, you can make it shorter and just match it up to the point.
You know, you have complete freedom over the components that create your graphic.
So you can rotate more and adjust it any way you like.
The idea is that if you're doing this arrow, you're kind of keeping it on a sort of a line
like that, so it needs to kind of flow.
Maybe it's a little large like this.
So this is my arrow, you know.
If again, you're not happy with the tail, all you have to do is go to the component
parts and adjust them any way you like.
Like, for example, I want the arrow to be thicker on that point where it reaches the
tip and then make the arrow longer like that.
Maybe rotate it, you know?
So all you need is just the component parts, go and adjust them.
If the background circle is too small, you can just make it larger or smaller and just,
you know, until you're happy.
When you're happy with your object, you just come out of the group and that you have it,
this is your arrow.
So this is nice because if I bring in another clip or I want to use this arrow in my project
somewhere, one thing is, you see here that the group has the size of all of the component
parts.
But I don't care about this part here on the bottom, which is actually the invisible ellipse
that I used to cut out from the main ellipse, right?
So if you don't like this object to look weird like this, with all that area that you're
actually not seeing, but it takes space.
You can actually use the option to crop the group, right.
Hold down the ALT key, or you go to the crop mode at the top here, or you hold down the
ALT key and crop the group to just fit the size you want.
Resize the group to a size doesn't work, because the visible size, because the object technically
is still visible, you just don't see it.
And there you go, this is your arrow object.
And another nice thing about this is because all of these shapes are native to Camtasia,
they are vector shapes and you can resize the group.
And it's going to be very sharp and also, one other added element is that it is transparent
and you can put it on top of other clips and use it in your projects.
For example, if I bring in a video clip, like for example, a map.
I bring in a map from my hard drive, place it in my document in my video, and put it
on a different layer there, on a different track.
You can see that I can see through my arrow to the map.
So if I want to indicate some area of my map, let me just make this large.
Zoom in, so resize the arrow like this, and just, you know, point to this car park, for
example, or whatever this is here.
You can rotate the object using the rotation controls and just indicate a building or something
on your map.
You can of course change the colour, so in Camtasia 2021, this new Quick Properties has
been introduced for the objects that are in a group.
So because these are now in a group, I can click on it and go to the Quick Property tab
here, and you can see the colours involved in my project, in my object.
I can make the arrow green if I want, or I can make the arrow red, without having to
go into the group and clicking on each component shape and changing its colour.
Right?
So the colours are all exposed in here.
I don't care about the dark colour of the dark ellipse, because that's not visible anyway.
So if you want to add this arrow to your library for using it, you can edit the properties
of this group, just click on this icon right here and remove the colour for the callout.
Remove that, and for the callout label, you can put here arrow colour, right?
So there you go.
You've created a reusable component, a reusable annotation if you want, and you can customize
its color.
And it has a nice field here for selecting the color and you can move it around.
And you can apply effects to it, so if I don't like the fact that this arrow doesn't really
look nice on the map, it kind of blends with the map, I can add effects to it, like for
example, I can go to Visual Effects and add a Drop Shadow to my arrow.
If I right-click on this group and rename it, let's call it Arrow, like this.
You can zoom in on the timeline here and you see it, this is my object.
And I can add a drop shadow to it like this, and you can see now, my arrow is raised from
the map.
You can tweak the orientation, the offset, the opacity, and the blur of this kind of
shadow to make it really look nice, okay?
So this is how you can do it.
And of course, you can do other shapes, like, you know, for example, you can do a, like
a piece of a puzzle, for example.
If you need that, to use that in a project or any other shapes that, you know, if you
think about it, if you go to all of these annotation shapes in here, you can actually
combine all of these to create different shapes.
And of course, you cannot actually free draw like you do in a vector program.
So of course, if you need more complex objects, then you have to draw them in a separate program
because Camtasia is not a vector drawing program.
So you can't really draw freehand in it or create complex object combinations.
But with the addition of this Media Matte, really this, I think, in my opinion, the Media
Matte is one of the best additions to Camtasia because it opens up a lot of possibilities
for more complex animations, complex graphics, masking.
You know, you can hide and show different objects and things, which was not possible
before version 2020.
In 2020, the Track Matte was introduced, which kind of does the same thing, but it's a little
more awkward cause you need to have a single track reserved for that particular effect.
And it's a bit weird to work with.
But the arrow and the graphics, you can, you can do it like this.
And if you think about it, you can combine all of these elemental graphics, elemental
shapes into more complex shapes but it depends on your project.
So when you think about what you might need in your projects, if you can achieve it from
basic shapes, then you can do it in Camtasia natively.
Here's another example.
How to create a gear icon.
Let's go to the Annotations, let's go to the All Shapes and choose a circle here, resize
it.
It helps if you put it in the middle of your scene because then it kind of helps you center
other objects.
And now, let's take a rectangle like this, make it the same colour.
Go to the colour picker, choose that colour expand it to be wider, maybe like this, not
so tall.
Hold down the Control key, if you want to resize things on the same axis.
Control C Control V to duplicate this, let's go to rotation.
You can go to rotation 90 degrees like that, and let's copy and paste, Control C Control
V let's do only 45.
Okay, I forgot to copy that.
Let's do 90 there.
Okay, now let's make another copy of this, Control C Control V, and go to do 135 like
that.
We have the gear.
Now we want to put a little hole in the middle for the, their gear wheel and click on the
circle again, Control C Control V and then make it black or another colour just so we
can see where it is.
Control Shift and resize it.
Make it as small as you like.
And then, we can apply it, move it to the top.
It needs to be on the top track there.
So just make it smaller, and now let's group all of these together, except for the black
circle.
Control G, move the black circle down and apply the visual effect for the black circle
Media Matte, to cut out the pieces.
By default, is going to be Alpha but if we go on the right side, Alpha invert, there
we go.
We've made a hole in the wheel.
Of course, you can still retain the flexibility of making it smaller, also retain the flexibility
of making the original circle smaller.
To make the gears more visible, like that maybe, or certain gears, if you want to change
their size, just hold down the Control key and resize them, symmetrically, whatever.
I'm just going to leave it the same size.
Now your object is done.
Select everything, Control G to group, and then you go, you have a gear icon.
And again, if we bring that map or whatever we had before onto the project and resize
it, put it on the second track there, you can see my object is see-through.
The same idea, you can change the colours here.
You can make it any colour you like, okay, there you go.
And you can apply the visual effects, like Drop shadow on it.
You know, you can do whatever.
So this is another example of quickly creating various shapes from basic shapes.
And this is very useful for other projects as well.
Like for example, let's say you want to create some interesting charts, which I'll make a
video on this.
Charts or diagrams or animated pie charts and things like that.
This is all done with the Media Matte and they look really cool and you can even animate
them and they will not lose their flexibility, and so on and customization as well.
So I hope this was useful to give you an understanding of how the Media Matte effects and how you
can use the masking to show and hide parts of objects, create your own custom shapes.
I hope you've learned something useful today.
Thank you for watching my videos, and if you haven't subscribed to my channel, feel free
to subscribe.
And if you have any questions or any ideas about what you might like to learn in Camtasia,
I do love to stretch Camtasia beyond its limits.
So if you have anything and any requirements, I'm taking requirements for videos, and I'd
be happy to do a video if it's interesting, and let me know in the comments, thank you
again for your time.
See you on the next one.