Chapter 6: Special Effects of the Camtasia Recorder

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Overview

Now that you’ve mastered the basics of recording screen video footage, we can learn how to make even greater use of the Camtasia Recorder by adding some record-time special effects to the mix. Used sparingly, these effects can do much to add some needed pizzazz and professionalism to your video.

In addition to merely looking or sounding cool, several of these effects are helpful in conveying additional useful information. For example, when using the Recorder to do systems monitoring, annotations like the computer name or a date/time stamp can help you to accurately label your videos as well as isolate any problems that occur. Visual and audio mouse click effects can let the audience know exactly when and where you clicked on a particular object.

While a number of these special effects have been largely supplanted by the effects in Camtasia Studio, at least for larger projects, I still find the Recorder effects useful for mockups, smaller videos, and informal work where I’m not necessarily going to be editing and producing a final cut within Camtasia Studio. As we go through this chapter, I will alert you to instances where the effects possibilities are identical or similar between the Camtasia Recorder and Camtasia Studio. In almost every case, you’ll want to perform those effects in Camtasia Studio instead, due mainly to the fact that Camtasia Studio effects are infinitely editable. They can be altered or removed at will, as opposed to the effects in the Camtasia Recorder, which are essentially “baked into” your base video footage. With Recorder-based effects, if you want to make any changes later, you’re basically stuck with rerecording the entire clip. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, and I’ll try to point these out as well.

In the previous chapter, we explored the View menu in Camtasia Recorder. Opening this menu reveals five toolbars: Annotation, Audio, Cursor, Zoom & Pan, and Camera. The Audio and Camera toolbars were discussed in the previous chapter, as they pertain more to the inclusion of additional content streams in the video than to special effects.

Any of these toolbars can be toggled on and off by either of the following methods:

• From the Effects menu, click the name of the toolbar you want to toggle. A check mark next to the toolbar name indicates that it is currently visible on the toolbar palette.

  or

• From the Toggle View drop-down arrow on the Main toolbar, choose the name of the toolbar you wish to toggle.

To turn on one of your special effects, simply click its corresponding button. The buttons of all currently enabled effects will have a “pressed-in” effect:

In this Annotation toolbar, both the System Stamp and Watermark effects are enabled.

Note that you needn’t necessarily have a particular toolbar up and visible in order to make use of its options. There are a few ways of enabling or disabling the options without clicking the corresponding buttons on the various toolbars.

You can toggle the settings of the different toolbar options as follows:

• From the Effects menu, mouse over the appropriate submenu, and then click on the effect you wish to enable/disable. A check mark will appear next to those enabled items that can be toggled off. A bullet will appear next to selected items that cannot be toggled (one item in the list must always be enabled). or

• Right-click on the Camtasia Recorder system tray icon, and from the Effects submenu, mouse over the submenu of the desired toolbar, and then select the effect you wish to enable/disable. or

• A few of the more often-used commands (e.g., turning on audio recording) can be accessed directly from the main Camtasia Recorder interface.