Hello, this is Cristi. In this very, very quick beginner tutorial for Camtasia,
I'm going to show you how you can highlight texts or certain words in a bit of text. So
it's a simple effect, but in Camtasia 2021, this is very easy to do.
You can do it in 2020 and 19. And I think in previous versions, but I'm using 2021 here.
So let's have a look. This is my scene here in Camtasia. New project, I have nothing on
and I'm going to bring in a little interesting quote from somewhere. So,
to start with I'm going to put my text on the canvas, right? So I want to use
annotations and go to the first tab here and use one of these annotations.
I like to use the ones without backgrounds, because then I can add my own customizations
after. So I'm going to use this one here, just plain and simple annotation. I'm going to add
it to the center of the scene. Double-click in it to go inside and edit the text. And I have
in my clipboard, I copied a quote from somewhere and I'm going to paste it right in here, paste
that. You can make it larger by the way, by changing the size of the text here on the right,
make sure you select it all like this. Control A and zoom, you know, scale it up.
And then if you need more space, you can actually drag the corners of this annotation to fill your
entire canvas. And again, if you double click inside to go to the text editing,
you can actually separate the words, press enter, maybe add a line here to say who said that quote,
and I can make the name smaller too, you know,
for a little variation. In these quotes in these annotations, you can use different
styles of text in the same annotation. So it's a little bit like a word processor in there.
So I'm going to actually use a different font here. You can customize the font just for that
part. You'd go to the drop down on the right side there and you just choose a different font here.
Sometimes Camtasia doesn't support a font maybe, like in this case here.
So you keep trying, just go down the list in your fonts list and just find a nice font you like.
There we go, this one works. So this quote is kind of interesting, like this, make sure you give it
a little space maybe, like so, it really doesn't matter. I'm just giving you examples here.
Right. So this is the part where you set up your text
and it's very important that your text is already set up and in place because
the next phase is going to be highlighting certain words in this quote with a little
kind of background, like a highlighter, right? So this is what we're going to do.
So I want to highlight some words here, a "little bit of good." I want to highlight the word
together, what "overwhelmed". I'm going to put overwhelm,
and then going to be where you are. I'm going to highlight "where you are" and "overwhelm", okay.
So three little highlights. I want to show you how to do them. So for that,
go to the bottom on the timeline here and make sure that your quote or your text
stays on screen for the entire duration of the animation. So I want this to be
on there for like 30 seconds. You know, you may want to do it shorter.
I'm going to Control and zoom in, and I'm going to add a highlight. And the highlight
really is just another annotation. In Camtasia, annotations are objects you can put on screen,
shapes, texts like we did with this text here. So I'm going to go to Annotations again,
and go to this tab here, Shapes. So we can go to the Shapes, you know, see a few shapes in here.
And I want my annotation to be like a straight, a rectangular kind of area that appears underneath
my text. Okay. So I can go to the Basic and show all shapes here and I can choose other
shapes from this. Don't worry about the color, you can customize the color. So I'm
going to drag this black, sort of gray one on the timeline, on the text here on the scene, right?
Like that. So the first thing is I want to highlight the word "bit of good", these little
bit of goods. Okay. Or let's just say "little bit." So I want to place this on here and cover
both words, like so. So on the timeline, I want to put this on where I want the highlight to come in,
right. So I may want to play from the start, the text without highlight and then at some
point I want that highlight to appear on my words. So I can move this left and right.
And now I want to, of course, this has covered my text, so I want to put it behind the text,
right? So in Camtasia you can reorder the tracks. So the first track is going to be my quote. I can
double click on the track and just rename the tracks, so I know what's on that track.
I can see what's on the track, but if you have a lot of tracks, it can get out of hand
really quickly. Double-click on this other one and call it Highlights. Okay,
so I have one highlight in here. I may have three highlights, so I want to highlight this part.
So I want to move this track to the bottom, just below that one, just drag the header like this,
and now you can see the text, you can see the highlight. Maybe the highlight is, I want it to be
a different color. No problem, click on it and go to the fill on the right side where the Properties
panel is and drop down the color tab and maybe let's choose green like this. I'm just going
to choose that color. It's really available for me right there. So this is one highlight there.
I may want this highlight to also be on another word. So I'm going to copy that. Copy.
And I want my highlights to come in kind of one after the other, as the person watching is reading
the text, so you can go do your little bit of good where you are. So that immediately after that,
I want to paste that annotation right here. So I'm going to move the play head down
the timeline. Control V. You notice Camtasia pastes that on a separate track because you know,
it will overlap the other one now and it's pasted in the same place.
So I need to click and move that to highlight "where you are",
like this. Again, I need to move this also to the bottom, like so. It doesn't have to
be before or after the previous one, you know, because they will be on screen at the same time.
And you can see here that maybe they touch if they're on separate lines,
maybe they touch each other like this, you know, the touch the, the borders.
Maybe you click on that one and kind of make it shorter. Just use the handles here to drag down a
bit. And on the previous one again, select that one and just push it up a little bit, like so.
So that you can clearly see they're own separate lines. Okay, so this is
very easy to do. I'm going to just adjust this a little bit to the top right there.
And now let's copy the third one, Control C on this one. And actually I want "overwhelmed",
this is the word I want to highlight. Paste again and move this on top of the "overwhelm" word.
Make it shorter like this, and again, move that track behind the text. Okay. The height is fine,
so there you go. I want to make this appear kind of later,
and I want these highlights to last for the maybe 10 seconds or so.
So I'm going to drag them around here, make them all the same
length, like this. So they all stop at the same time.
So finally, we want these highlights to reveal in an interesting way. So you can see now
that if I play this, they just show up on the screen. There's nothing interesting happening,
no animation, so actually what I wanted, you can add animation to these as they come in.
So you can make them come in from the side or whatever, but well, you know what,
I'm going to use a simple animation to appear like they've been drawn by a marker,
like a green marker on top of the texts. So very easy to do,
just go to Transitions. And what we want is a Wipe transition. Go to the top here.
Camtasia now has a bunch of transitions, 120 or so. So it may be hard to find them. So you can
go to this dropdown here and filter by Wipes like this. And what we're looking for is something like
a horizontal wipe, like this one, Gradient Wipe, there you go. That's the one we want.
Drag this transition onto annotation with the highlights, not on the text. So you can see now
that if I hold my mouse, it shows the start and the end of that annotation in green, which means
it's going to apply the transition at both ends, which is what I think what we want. But if you
move your mouse towards the left or the beginning, you notice now it's going to add it only at the
start. And so at the end, if you move it towards the end, it's going to move it just to the end.
So you decide where you want to add these transitions. I'm going to apply this transition
now and let's see how the animation comes in. Play before, so you can see. If it is too fast, we can
see it's coming in from the left. If it is too fast, you can always zoom in here and take this
transition and make it longer. So, the annotation isn't actually moving, but the transition fades
it in from the left. So I can actually make this quite long. Maybe it's too long now, let's see.
Yeah, it may be a little bit too long, so you can make it a shorter again, sort of like this.
Let's see what's happening. We want the first one to appear before the second one, right? So
I'm going to just make it a bit shorter now. I'm going to move this one here and again,
I'm going to drag the same Gradient Wipe to it on the left, make it a bit longer.
And finally, I'm going to move this one here and again, Gradient Wipe on this one and move it
like that. Now, the only thing you could do is if you click on the transition and you've added
the gradient wipe at the end as well, so let's move them to the end also. I've added these
at the end. I'm going to make these the same length here. So they end up at the same time.
Let's see what's happening. They all fade in from the left, but if you want them to
fade in from the right, you can click on this transition here and click Reverse,
which is actually gonna make it fade from the other side. So let's see now.
Okay. So the the third one, you notice, "overwhelm" fades out on the other direction.
So this is again, artistic freedom here, you can do whatever you want. So now let's see
the whole animation here, what's happening with it. Let's play the whole thing now.
That's the first text. That's the second one.
And that's the third one. So there you have it. This is a very easy effect, you can do it.
Now, just be careful. If you need to make changes to the text, you need to move these around. But
the nice part is that because we haven't used any animation in our project, we just used those
transitions, it's very easy to move around all of these highlights, and they will go with them.
The transitions will go with them. They will all go with the texts,
but just to keep things very nicely organized, what you can do is,
you can group the whole thing. So if you're finished with this quote
and you're happy with how it looks, you know, it's all in place, everything is nice, you know, adjust
the duration so that everything disappears and appears at the right time, maybe like this. Okay.
So now, I want everything to stay together and I don't want it to be disturbed if I'm moving around
and making other edits. So the only way, you know, the only way to keep them together is really
just select everything like this, or press Control A and Control G, to group or right-click
here and say Group. That's going to create a single object group from these objects here,
which I can then move around. And you notice my animation and everything works
and still works in there and it goes with it. Even better, I can actually scale this if I want,
if I think, oh, it's too large. I can actually scale the whole thing,
like so. Because it is a single object now and everything would still continue to work.
Right. So that's a very simple procedure, very simple effect, we're using just a simple
annotation, a bunch of texts and transitions. So in Camtasia, this is very easy to do.
You can also add this to your library and reuse it in other projects. And all you have
to do is just arrange the text, put new text in, move these things around and you're done.
So I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial for Camtasia basics. This is showing you
the annotation fading in and fading out, how to highlight some texts and make it look a
little more interesting than just static text. So this is very easy, if you want to highlight some
bits of texts in a presentation. So in, you know, think about a PowerPoint, but more like animation
and action on the screen to keep your viewers engaged, draw attention to a specific words.
You can think of a lot of applications for this. Thank you for watching. And
please subscribe to my channel for more simple tutorials like this for absolute beginners
in Camtasia, and I will have even more coming. So I will see you on the next one.