Working with Visual Properties to Create New Animations in Camtasia 8

If you own Camtasia 8 you’ll notice that the ability to create animations was added in a tab called “Visual Properties”. Because I tend to be a creature of habit and am used to doing my animations in PowerPoint it has take me a long time to get used to doing some of them in Camtasia. There was a certain point in a client video, though, that I thought would be a perfect place to add a few animation and if I could do them in Camtasia it would actually save me quite a bit of time.

A few things you might use the Visual Property tab to create animations could be

  • Callouts that animate across the screen to point to different places on a video or different images
  • Multiple videos could come in from the sides and play simultaneously
  • Images can grow or shrink on the canvas or even fade away from view

In my case I had a video where there was about one and a half minutes of background information discussed by the narrator in the middle of the video. I wanted to reiterate what she was saying by using a text callout on the screen but I didn’t want to have it on top of the image of her software application.  I also just thought it would keep people awake if I did a little interesting animation in the middle of what was a very dry technical video.

Below is an excerpt where I demonstrate my technique for the students in our Screencast Video Coaching membership.

Visual Animations in Camtasia 8

If you have any animation techniques you’d like to share please comment with the link to your video below. We’d love to see them.

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Doug Reply

Well, learned a couple things here. I like the way you changed text without doing a fade by doing a copy-paste. But I also learned about changing the background color in the dimensions dialogue. I’ve been creating a white, square call-out and inserting that on track #1 as my white bg. But this will eliminate the need for that.

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