Camtasia Studio Getting Started Series: Camtasia Editor Tour Video Lecture | Create a Video Masterpiece with Camtasia: Learn and Master - Professional Skills

This tutorial will give you a quick tour of the editor
to help you get started.
The three main areas of the editor are the Clip
Bin, the Canvas, and the Timeline. Let’s start with
the Clip Bin.
Along the bottom of this area you’ll see a set of
tabs. The Clip Bin tab is selected, and I like to
think of this as the “home” tab.
The Clip Bin holds all of the video, audio, and
image files that are being used in the current
project.
Import additional media to use in your project by
clicking this button.
Drag individual clips from the Clip Bin to the
Timeline to add them to your video. The next tab
is the Library.
The Library holds a variety of title clips, video
segments, animations, callouts, audio and other
media that can be used from project to
project -- and you can add your own at any time.
The rest of the tabs are for adding or editing
special effects to your video.
Click on More to view additional features you can
use. To make a new recording, click the Record
the screen button.
And when you’re finished editing your project,
click the Produce and share button to produce
your video into a number of different shareable
formats. And just like most other applications, all
features and settings for Camtasia Studio can be
accessed from the menu bar.
The next stop on this tour is the Canvas. You may
also hear this area referred to as the Preview
Window at times because this is
where you preview your video as it’s playing back
on your timeline. The Canvas gives you total
control over how your video is displayed
for your viewers. Let me give you some examples
of what I mean. Right now the video fills the entire
canvas.
If you click and hold on top of the video, you’ll see
some yellow gridlines. You can drag the video
and position it wherever you want and
the gridlines help snap your video to specific
areas or quadrants. If you’d like to resize your
recording to be smaller, or larger, within your
final video, just grab one of the corners and drag
to resize it. You can even rotate your video to
customize the appearance even more.
For more details on working with the canvas,
check out our Canvas In-Depth tutorial.
Before leaving the canvas, there are a few more
things to note. Here are the playback controls
and a helpful time code to show the
current position of the playhead and overall
duration of the video. Scrub through the video to
quickly locate a specific segment.
Expand this menu to change the view percentage
of your video on the canvas; or choose Shrink to
fit so everything is sure to be
visible. But please note that this doesn’t change
your editing or production dimensions for your
video.
It only changes how the video looks on the
canvas to help with editing.
If you do want to change your editing dimensions,
which will change the size of your produced
video, click here.
This will bring up the Editing Dimensions dialog.
By default, Camtasia uses the “Maximum 720p
HD” option.
This is a versatile standard that’s comfortably
viewed on large monitors, laptops, and tablets -
even the small ones.
For more on editing dimensions and the default
option, check out our Editing Dimensions Basics
tutorial.
The last area we are going to cover is the
Timeline. This is where you assemble and edit
your video.
There are an unlimited number of Tracks for you
to build your video projects. You can place video,
audio, or images on any track
and at any position. Click the plus button to make
new tracks and right-click a track to rename it,
remove it, or choose other options
from the menu. Adjust the height of a track by
hovering over one of the edges until you see a
double arrow.
Or adjust the heights of all tracks by using this
slider. You’ll notice the playhead has a green in-
point and a red out-point connected to it.
These are used for making selections on your
timeline to help you delete, copy, or perform other
actions.
The quickest way to clear a selection made with
these points is to double-click the playhead.
The timeline toolbar contains a zoom-in and
zoom-out slider, which really helps with editing
as it lets you make more precise cuts and
selections. There are also buttons to cut, split,
copy, and paste media on the timeline.
There is so much more I’d love to share with you
about the timeline in this tutorial
but hopefully this editor overview covered enough
to get you started and ready to explore on your
own.