Zooming… …panning…
…even wild, rotating callouts.
These are all made possible by animations.
They grab your viewers’ attention… … and they’re great for illustrating concepts.
To really understand how animations work, we have to start with visual properties.
An object’s visual properties are made up of position…
…rotation… …scale or size…
…and opacity – or how “see-through” something is.
In Camtasia, all of these are adjusted with pixel-perfect accuracy in the Properties panel,
under the visual properties tab.
For example, here’s the scale slider and here’s where you can add rotation.
Most people take a more hands-on approach by arranging media directly on the canvas,
but any arrangements made on the canvas are always reflected in the properties panel.
So feel free to work back and forth between the two - to get things positioned just right.
Now let’s shift down to the timeline.
Here is the same image I was playing around with on the canvas.
It has a set of properties that are constant and therefore the text remains in the same
spot from the beginning of its appearance on the timeline to the end.
Here’s how we can change that.
Add an animation by clicking on the animations tab and dragging an animation to the timeline.
Animations appear as arrows directly on top of media.
This animation is a change from one set of visual properties, to another – a bridge
from a beginning to an end.
The length of the animation arrow determines how long the change will take, or the speed
of the animation.
When you first add an animation, it won’t appear to have changed anything and that’s
because technically, it’s transitioning between two identical sets of identical visual properties.
So, it’s really after adding an animation that the work is done.
To adjust what an animation does, first select the media.
Then, put the playhead to the right side of the animation to change the visual properties
of the end state.
And likewise, put the playhead anywhere on the left side to change the animation’s
beginning state.
Also, double clicking on the arrow will automatically move the playhead to the end state of that
particular animation.
Now let’s go fiddle with that image a bit.
Let’s preview what we just did, an animation from beginning to end.
This one is pretty basic, in fact, something simple often works out for the best, but
the freedom is there to achieve complicated effects with a little experimentation.
For example, the intro to all of these tutorial videos, is built with animations in Camtasia.
Notice how I even use animations on groups.
This is handy if you need to move multiple objects all at the same time.
Let’s keep going and explore a couple more animation options.
By right clicking on an animation, you can copy and paste
You can even copy and paste from one clip to another
This would be useful, say, if you wanted a set of different images to all animate in
the same fashion.
Right-click again Here is the option for setting the animation’s easing.
You have five choices: Auto, which defaults to exponential easing
Exponential Linear or no easing
Spring And Bounce
Each one is good for different things and the default setting is auto.
Exponential easing moves the object at a variable speed, moving slower out of the gate and speeding
into the finish.
Bounce and spring both add extra motion to the end of the animation, to add a more “real-life”
look to moving objects Animations with a linear easing move at a
constant speed, but the important thing to keep in mind is that all easing methods
take exactly the same amount of time to get from point A to point B.
In general, I prefer the look of an exponentially eased animation, it seems a little more
natural and it’s what you’re probably used to seeing.
Well, that about wraps up our in-depth look at animations.
With a little practice, you’ll be focusing viewers attention and sending things flying
across your screen in no time. …and as always, thanks for watching!