From the course: Camtasia 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

Using annotations - Camtasia Tutorial

From the course: Camtasia 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

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Using annotations

- [Instructor] Annotations are a combination of text and graphic overlays that can be extremely effective at drawing your viewer's eye to exactly what you want them to focus on. And when you click on annotations, there are six tabs with several examples of each type of annotation. In the first three tabs, annotations are grouped by styles click the styles dropdown and you can see the default styles that are available to you. I'll select the bold style. Now when you select a style in one tab Camtasia will automatically select that style in the other tabs for you, allowing you to create a more consistent look and feel within your movie. Now all annotations work in a similar way. You select the annotation that you want to use and you drag it onto your canvas. It's instantly converted into a movie clip and that clip is created on the next available track in your timeline and it begins wherever your play head is currently located. You can then use all of the normal onscreen controls that we've already seen for the canvas and make further refinements to your object in your properties inspector. Now depending on what type of annotation object that you selected, the properties inspector is going to show you all of the available options that you can customize for that particular object. Now I added a couple of clip markers to identify where the dialogue is talking about a particular region of the graph that's here on the canvas. Now let's draw our viewers attention to this region of the graph by changing this annotations type from a star to a rectangle. Next let's drag the outline thickness from zero up to a setting of about 10. You can drag it up or you can just type in a number here. That'll give the shape a bit more weight to it. Then click the outline color well and select the eyedropper tool. You can now sample a color that somewhere on your screen that going to harmoniously draw your viewers attention to this area of your screen. Let's select the yellow color from the bold annotation panel by clicking on it. And that looks pretty good. Then let's clear the fill by dragging its opacity slider all the way down to zero. Okay we have a decent look going on now. Let's refine it to tie it into our story. Adjust the timing of the clip on your timeline to match the action that you want to highlight. I'll drag the clip down on the timeline until the starting point snaps into alignment with the first marker and then make a trim edit until it aligns with the second marker. We'll jump our play head down to that location. If you move your play head right up to where the first marker is, you can see these small dots on the graph that are indicating where the dialogue is referring to, then make adjustments to the onscreen controls to get a rough shape, then jump your play head down to the end of the clip to tie in that portion of the dialogue as well. Now if you scrub your play head over this region, you can see that the annotation draws your viewers attention to exactly that portion of the screen and it's timed perfectly to the dialogue. And to take your annotation game to the next level you can add a transition effect so that your annotations animate in and out of the frame and we'll look at transitions next.

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