Camtasia Hacks!
When you want to learn new Microsoft PowerPoint tricks, how to organize your OneNote, or remove background noise in iMovie, what do you do? YouTube it!
Product demos and video tutorials are a great way to learn software. Video learning is a BIG part of my job as a technical instructional designer. And I have some productivity tips to share to help you create product demos more efficiently.
The next time you find yourself in Camtasia creating a video tutorial, don’t make the same mistakes I did in the beginning. You will save yourself time (and headaches) by following these tips. BTW, stay tuned to the end for a bonus accessibility tip.
Start at the beginning. Work from left to right in the timeline. If you start editing the end of your video, you will have to keep bumping content to keep it aligned as you work backwards. Edit the major visuals and audio from the beginning, and then go back and add callouts, annotations, etc.
Copy/Paste effects. If you want all of your objects to have the same intro/outro fade effects, you only have to program it once. You can then right click that object, copy the effect, and paste it on to all of the others. This way you don’t have to tweak the behaviors and speeds of everything on your timeline.
Adjust your cursor. Before I start chopping screen capture footage, I set cursor effects for the whole video first. My preferred settings are 175% size so learners can see the mouse, and then I add cursor smoothing and set a mouse clicking noise at 15%. I recommend doing this before splitting and editing the video footage so that is consistent throughout the video; you don’t want to resize in the end, forget to select one small clip, and have the cursor shrink and grow.
Remove excess tracks and media. This is a step I do at the very end. Select Media in the upper left corner, and then right click in the media pane. You will see the option to delete unused media. You can also right click in the list of tracks below and remove empty tracks. This cleans things up and makes the project file smaller when you go to save.
🌟🌟🌟 Bonus Accessibility Tip: Create captions in Camtasia. You don’t need an extra fancy program to caption your content! Navigate to the side panel and select Audio Effects. There you’ll find the captioning functionality, and when you “Insert Caption” you can just copy/paste from your script. You then can sync captions to your audio manually, so I only suggest doing this for shorter videos. You can export the caption .srt file from there! I delete the captions before exporting mp4s because I don’t want them hardcoded to the video. By importing the .srt files separately into Storyline projects, learners can toggle the closed captions on and off. 🌟🌟🌟
And there you have it! These “Camtasia hacks” come naturally to me now, so keep tinkering around in the application and you will get more and more efficient as well. What are your favorite little tricks for working in Camtasia?
