Camtasia Studio 4: The Definitive Guide (Wordware Applications Library)

When it comes to spicing up your freshly edited footage with special effects, you needn’t look any further than the Edit section of your Task List, as this chapter focused exclusively on exactly these supersexy effects (excepting Audio Enhancements). Here’s a tightly condensed summation of each:

• Picture-in-Picture (PIP). With some new video footage in your PIP track, you learned how to perform various editing effects for both side-by-side and floating PIP video. In addition to setting up the preview to your liking and cutting out unwanted portions, you have access to special PIP-only editing commands. Specify when you would like the PIP image hidden or shown. Choose the window’s size and position. Even format your PIP window with fades, borders, and drop shadows.

• Transitions. These special effects provide a smooth and appealing means of moving from one clip to the next. Adding a transition is as simple as dragging one onto your Storyboard. You can easily change/remove them later as well as set the transitions’ duration. Remember that transitions look gaudy if overdone, so try to exercise restraint.

• Callouts and Flash Hot Spots. Callouts are an excellent means of “marking up” a video by superimposing text and graphics on top of it. For Flash videos, you can even add a bit of interactivity by making your callouts clickable. These can be formatted with a variety of colors and effects. You have a library of pre-installed callouts available to you, and you can add as many custom callouts as you like.

• Zoom-n-Pan. If you want to show the details of a particular window or toolbar more closely, it’s easy to zoom in for a closer look. While zoomed in, Camtasia Studio makes it a snap to pan around to reveal other areas of the recording area. You can manage your zoom and pan effects on the Zoom-n-Pan pane within Camtasia Studio.

• Flash Quiz and Survey. For those who produce their videos in Flash (SWF and FLV), Camtasia Studio offers multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short-answer questions to test your viewers’ knowledge or solicit their feedback. Feedback can be general; it can also be custom-tailored to the current question, or even to an individual response. The user’s score (or survey data, as the case may be) can then be uploaded to a learning management system via SCORM or automatically sent to a specified e-mail address.

• Captions. Camtasia Studio now sports both open and (for Flash videos) closed captioning, allowing your non-native language speaking or hearing-impaired audience to have better access to your content. The process is fairly automatic. Just type or paste your script into the text window, and then play through your video, paying attention to the narration. Simply click on each narrative segment as it’s being spoken to synchronize the text with the audio. Additionally, you have a few formatting options such as character width and whether you’d like the captions superimposed over the video.