Basic Editing in the Timeline View

1. Now that you have some clips on the Timeline, it’s time to learn how we can wield its power to make those clips dance and sing. The Timeline view opens by default, and for good reason: All your editing happens here. Before we delve into the details, I’m going to give you a bird’s-eye view of the Timeline and its functions. First off, your Time- line view looks a bit like this, and contains the following components:

   

   1. Editing toolbar, 2. Time reference area, 3. Video seek bar, 4. Playback head, 5. Tracks, 6. Track locks, 7. Scroll bar.

2. Editing toolbar. This is where you can execute editing commands such as zooming in and out on the Timeline, cutting selected segments, splitting clips, alternating between the Timeline and Storyboard views, adjusting your audio on the fly, and selecting which tracks you wish to view.

3. Time reference area. This bar shows the running time of your video being incremented across the Timeline. It gives you a good idea of the length of each segment and how it contributes to the overall running time. The time reference area will be incremented differently depending on your current level of zoom.

4. Video seek bar. The little green triangle that represents the spot on your Timeline from whence you’ll begin playback. The seek bar is also used for the selection of clip sections so that they can be edited or removed. Selected portions are highlighted in blue.

5. Playback head. This vertical line shows where you currently are in the playback of your Timeline. If you click Stop, the playback head will return to the seek bar.

6. Tracks. In addition to the Video and Audio tracks, virtually all special effects have their own track so that you can easily see exactly where they appear on the Timeline.

7. Track locks. These can lock specific tracks (or groups of tracks) so that they are unaffected by any editing you do to a specific part of the Timeline.

8. Scroll bar. If you zoom in on your Timeline to the point that your clips can no longer be displayed within your Camtasia Studio application window, the scroll bar appears so that you still have access to your entire Timeline. You can also scroll your content with your mouse wheel if you have one.

The Timeline view offers the most complete picture of your video and all its elements. After all, the Timeline is not only where you can arrange the videos, images, and audio clips from your Clip Bin, it’s also where you manage special effects like Callouts, Picture-in-Picture, and Quizzes. Each of these elements displays in the Timeline in its own track. More on tracks in a bit. For now, we’ll be focusing mainly on the Video track and Audio 1 track, as these are the tracks that are open by default.

All the imported video and image clips are placed in your Video track. If the video clip in question contains any narration or mouse/keyboard sound effects in its audio track, you’ll find this information in the Audio 1 track. And yes, there is an Audio 2 track (hence the need for a numerical designation). Audio 2 is where the imported audio clips go when you add them to your Timeline. Both audio tracks appear as waveform images on your Timeline. We’ll talk more about Camtasia Studio’s audio capabilities in Chapter 10, “Working with Other Media: Audio, PIP, and Title Clips.”

Viewing Your Work on the Timeline

Concentrating on our Video track, if you add a series of videos and still images, you’ll see a multitude of boxes representing these clips on the Timeline. Within each box, there is a thumbnail image that signifies the clip’s contents. You’ve probably noticed that all of these boxes are of varying sizes. This is because the width of the clip’s box on the Timeline is demonstrative of the clip’s actual length. Check out the row of numbers between your Editing toolbar and your Video track:

This is the time reference area. It is your guide to gauging just how long your video is getting as you add and edit your content. It also offers the most convenient way by far of instantly moving to any point in your video. Place your mouse cursor over any point on the time reference area and click. What just happened? Your seek bar (that little green upside-down triangle) immediately jumped to where you clicked, and the content of the Video Preview area changed. You are now at the exact point in your video that you selected. If you click the Play button within the Video Preview area, the video will play from that point forward. Click Stop, and the playback head will return to the seek bar. The one problem with this method of moving the seek bar around is that you can’t really see where you’re going in the preview area until you click. You can remedy this with an alternate way of moving through your video, with the preview area’s scrubber bar. The scrub- ber bar is that little round button on a slider, which looks like this:

Just click and drag the playback head around, and you can see in the preview area exactly where you are and where you’re going. Notice that the seek bar in the Timeline follows you as you do so.

Previewing Your Content

The ability to control your Timeline’s playback doesn’t stop with the basics. You have a range of choices for moving around in your video preview as well as adjusting its view. Here’s a quick reference table that may help:

Open table as spreadsheet

Name	Button	Menu Command	Hotkey	Notes
Play		Play > Play/Pause	Ctrl-Space	Toggles between Play and Pause.
Pause		Play > Play/Pause	Ctrl-Space
Stop		Play > Stop	Ctrl+Alt-Space
Beginning	---	Play > Beginning	Ctrl-Home	Returns to the beginning of the Timeline.
End	---	Play > End	Ctrl-End	Moves to the end of the Timeline.
Previous Clip		Play > Previous Clip	Ctrl+Alt-	This command and the next will quickly move you from one clip to another on your Timeline.
Next Clip		Play > Next Clip	Ctrl+Alt- →
Step Backward		Play > Step Backward	Ctrl-←	Holding down this and the next hotkeys will rewind/fast forward through your content.
Step Forward		Play > Step Forward	Ctrl-→
Previous Marker	---	Play > Previous Marker	Ctrl-[	This command and the next let you quickly move from marker to marker on the Timeline. We’ll discuss markers in detail later in this chapter.
Next Marker	---	Play > Next Marker	Ctrl-]
Toggle Shrink-to-Fit mode		View > Shrink to Fit		If the dimensions of your clip are larger than the preview area, this command toggles between scaling your content down and displaying it full-size with scroll bars.
Full Screen		View > Full Screen	Alt-Enter (can also press Esc to exit)	Displays your content in full-screen mode, meaning that you will not have access to the Timeline or any other part of the Camtasia Studio interface, so you’d better be comfortable with the playback hotkeys before doing it.
Detach video preview				Undocks the preview area to its own window, where it can be dragged to another part of the screen, or even to a second monitor.

Tip 

I’m a big fan of using hotkeys to get around. Once you’ve got them down, navigating even a complicated series of clips becomes child’s play. Plus, hotkeys are the only way to rewind or fast forward in your Video Preview. And finally, once you’ve learned these hotkeys, learning to select content for editing with the keyboard is just a matter of adding the Shift key to the mix (more on this coming up).

In brief: Learn them. Use them. They’ll make your work that much easier.

Moving, Selecting, and Trimming Your Timeline Content

Moving Clips Around on the Timeline

Note 

Audio and PIP clips behave a little differently than video clips on the Timeline. Video clips always appear next to one another in direct succession. They may be reordered at any time, but there can be no pauses between them. Audio clips in the Audio 2 track as well as video in your PIP track have some “give” to them. They’re a lot more flexible in terms of where they can be placed.

Selecting Content for Editing on the Timeline

Now that we know how to move around in the video and play back our content in the preview area, we’re one step closer to doing some editing. But we have to first select the content in our Timeline that we want to apply those editing changes to. Selected content on the Timeline is highlighted in blue, like this:

The easiest way to select the segment is by clicking and dragging on the time reference area. Just place your mouse cursor where you’d like the selection to begin, click and hold, drag the cursor to the end point of the desired selection, and then release. The reverse also works (selection from the end to the beginning). When mousing over either end of the selection, its triangle will glow red. This can be handy when doing a very fine selection where the two ends are close together, as the red highlight indicates which side of the selection will move when you click and drag. Zooming in on the Timeline can help with this problem as well - more on that in a moment.

Note 

You may notice when dragging around to make your selections that your selection occasionally “snaps” to objects, such as the beginning or end of video and audio clips, as if they were magnetized. This is done intentionally to facilitate the editing of your clips without accidentally overlapping and clipping out content you don’t want to lose. I personally find it helpful, but if it annoys you, you can turn off this snapping effect for the various objects that support snapping. Simply choose View > Snap-to, and then choose the object type you want to disable from the submenu.

In addition to selecting with the mouse, there are more precise selections that we can make using the keyboard hotkeys. Now, assuming you’ve been a good student and have learned all the basic playback hotkeys, adding the power of selection is a breeze. Just hold down the Shift key in addition to the desired key combination.

For example, we learned you can step forward in the Timeline by pressing Ctrl-→ (as well as hold this hotkey down to fast forward). By pressing or holding Ctrl+Shift-→, you do pretty much the same thing, except that you’re selecting as you go. You can also select from a certain point to the beginning or end of its clip by making use of the Previous Clip/Next Clip commands (Ctrl+Shift+Alt-→ and Ctrl+Shift+Alt-←), or even select from a point all the way to the beginning or end of the entire Timeline with the Beginning and End commands (Ctrl+Shift-Home, Ctrl+Shift-End).

Tip 

Of course, nothing prevents you from using a combination of your mouse and keyboard selection techniques. I do it all the time. Just do a general selection with your mouse cursor, and then use your keyboard hotkeys to refine it by stepping the selection forward or backward a little at a time. Note that you only have control over one end of the selection, namely the last end (where your finger left the mouse button). So if it’s the beginning part of the selection that you need to finely adjust, perform your mouse selection starting at the end of the desired selection and then going back to the beginning.

Zooming In and Out on the Timeline

If you want to do any detailed selections inside a lengthy video, you’ll be subjecting yourself to a lot of frustration if you don’t learn how to zoom. Zooming in and out on your Timeline is a wonderful way to either magnify a small portion of a single clip so that you can perform extremely fine editing or pull back to get a broad overview of the entire Timeline. And of course, there are numerous small increments between these two extremes. When zooming in, the width of each of your clips appears longer. Additionally, you’ll notice that the time reference area has shifted, and that the increments between time designations have changed to reflect the current zoom level.

Zooming in or out doesn’t just affect the view of your clips - the Timeline functions differently, too. Specifically, stepping forward or backward (either with selection or without) is finer when zoomed in. That is, each step consists of fewer frames. The opposite is true when zoomed out. So, when using the keyboard hotkeys to step the selection gradually forward or backward, you might find that the granularity of your selection is just too coarse. If so, the problem may simply be that you aren’t zoomed in far enough.

On your Editing toolbar, you can easily zoom by clicking the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons.

These buttons zoom in increments, so clicking them multiple times will have a cumulative effect. Note that there are also four keyboard hotkeys for zooming, all of which can be found in the View menu of Camtasia Studio. They are:

Open table as spreadsheet

Zoom Type	Hotkey	Note
Zoom In	Ctrl-+ (plus)	Zooms in incrementally.
Zoom Out	Ctrl-– (minus)	Zooms out incrementally.
Zoom to Fit	Ctrl-F9	Sets the zoom so that the whole Timeline fits precisely within your application window.
Zoom to Selection	Ctrl-F10	Zooms in on your current selection, fitting it to the exact width of the Camtasia Studio application window. You must have a segment selected in order to use it (which should go without saying, but I thought I’d state it for the record).

Trimming Content from the Timeline: Method 1

So, we’ve learned how to make selections, and even to zoom in for a closer look. What’s the real-world use for all this? Well, friends, selecting content designates it out of all your other content to be on the business end of your editing commands. For audio segments, this may mean fading in the sound or cranking up the volume, but for video segments, it pretty much means only one thing: deletion.

After importing your raw footage, it’s entirely likely that you’ll find segments within your clips you’ll want to get rid of. Whether it’s a bad take, an errant window opening in the middle of your recording area, or a pause big enough to drive a Mack truck through, we all have content we’d rather leave on the cutting room floor, so to speak. To cut a particular segment, the first step is to simply select it.

After selecting the doomed material, it’s a simple matter of executing the cut by doing one of the following:

• Click the Cut Selection button on the Editing toolbar ( ).

  or

• Choose Cut Selection from the Edit menu.

  or

• Press Ctrl-X. Note that this differs from most other applications in that the cut material is not placed in the clipboard for later pasting. It’s just plain gone.

Boom. Done. Note that no gaping holes are left - everything to the right of the cut segment now butts right up against everything to the left. For the visually inclined, here’s a quick before-and-after shot to illustrate:

Also, keep in mind that your cut can be within a single clip or can span many clips. If you can select it, you can trash it. But there’s something important you need to make note of: Camtasia Studio utilizes what is known as non-destructive editing. This means that your original clips (those little guys sitting in the Clip Bin) are untouched.

How does Camtasia Studio do this? Well, your project file references all the clips you dragged down to the Timeline, and in its internal data structure, all your little edits are noted. The preview compiles this information on the fly while you’re playing back the content of your Timeline, but those referenced files are not actually changed in any way. This gives you tremendous flexibility. In addition to not having to make a bunch of file backups, you have the freedom to reuse your clips for different purposes. You could theoretically drag the same clip from the Clip Bin to three different locations on your Timeline, making different edits to each one. Camtasia Studio would track all this, and the original file wouldn’t be harmed.

If so desired, you can bring back your deleted material by choosing Undo. If you don’t dig your undo, it’s easy to Redo what you did (or is it undid?). These commands can be executed thusly: Keep in mind that, depending on the size and complexity of your cut, it may take Camtasia Studio a few seconds to get everything reassem- bled. If you really mess things up, you always have the option of trashing the clip, and then dragging the original clip down from the Clip Bin to re-edit as needed. If you want to get rid of an entire clip, no selecting is necessary. Simply click on the clip and press Delete (or right-click the clip and choose Remove from Timeline).

Open table as spreadsheet

Name	Menu Command	Hotkey	Main Toolbar Button
Undo	Edit > Undo	Ctrl-Z
Redo	Edit > Redo	Ctrl-Y

Trimming Content from the Timeline: Method 2

Sometimes you might just need to trim a few seconds off the beginning or end of the original clip. You know, those moments when you were busy fumbling around the Recorder, trying to get it to start or stop? Obviously, you don’t want to keep those parts.

Now, while Method 1 would also work just fine for getting rid of those portions, there is an alternate way. Go ahead and click on one of your clips in the Timeline. It should look like this:

The beginning and end of each clip can be dragged to make it shorter.

You see those little triangles on each end? By placing your mouse cursor over one of these (until your cursor turns into a dual-headed arrow (↔), you can click and drag to shorten the clip on either end. Now, you do have to be ever-watchful of your mouse cursor placement. Since the end of one clip and the beginning of the next are so close together, you can end up manipulating the wrong clip if you’re not careful. The advantage that this has over Method 1 is that you can always elongate the clip back to its original size (but not longer, since by definition a video only has a finite amount of material to work with), effectively undoing your cut, even if you originally did it 100 commands ago. Audio clips can be shortened the same way. Images, however, are a different story….

If you dragged any images from your Clip Bin onto the Timeline, you may have noticed your image had a duration of five seconds on the Timeline. Why five seconds, you ask? Well, since static media elements like images (and title clips, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter) have no pre-established duration, Camtasia Studio assigns it one for display in your video.

I bring this up because the duration of an image on the Timeline can also be changed with Method 2. Simply by clicking and dragging on the clip’s border, it can easily be shortened or, since an image has no inherent duration, lengthened. You can take that five-second image clip and make it .1 seconds or 1,000, whatever suits your needs.

The recently added clip doesn’t have to be five seconds, of course. That’s just the default set by the program - a default that can be altered at will.

If you want to change the default length for images on the Timeline, do the following:

1. In Camtasia Studio, choose Options… from the Tools menu. It should automatically open to the Program tab.

2. In the section marked Default duration (seconds), alter the Images field by clicking the spinner arrows or simply entering a number directly into the field. The field supports a range from 1 to 60 seconds. Click OK.

3. Drag an image clip from the Clip Bin onto the Timeline. The duration of the clip will reflect the new settings.

Note 

Please keep in mind that, just as with Method 1, your video’s audio track will be gobbled up at the same rate as the Video track when reducing the length in this manner. Any special effects caught in the crossfire will also be gone. However, unlike Method 1, this method will not touch your Audio 2 track or your PIP tracks. We’ll learn more about singling out individual tracks for editing when we talk about locking our tracks, coming up in a minute or two.

Advanced Editing Techniques

Splitting a Clip

Say that you have a wonderful video clip, every second of which is solid gold. You don’t want to trim out any of it. But you would like to add a segment right into the middle of the clip that nicely illustrates one of your points. You already know by now that you can freely move clips around to reorder them. But to stick one clip in the middle of another? Well, friends and neighbors, you can accomplish this worthy goal by splitting the clip into two pieces. Once split, the two pieces act like separate clips, and can be individually moved and edited. And yes, you can insert other clips in between them.

To split a clip into two parts, do the following:

1. Place the seek bar where you’d like the split to occur by clicking the appropriate spot on the time reference area.

2. Execute the split by clicking the Split button on the Editing toolbar ( ).

   or

   Choose Split from the Edit menu.

   or

   Right-click the video clip in the Timeline, and then choose Split.

   or

   Press Ctrl-D.

3. The clip is split into two pieces. Both parts will have the same name (the original clip’s file name), so be careful when moving them around that you’re not editing the wrong portion inadvertently.

Extending a Video Clip

It happens to the best of us. You record a clip with the utmost care, believing that you have the timing of the piece exactly lined up with your planned narration. You read your script aloud while playing back the contents of your Timeline, with one eye on the preview area and the other on the piece of paper in front of you. Oops. You didn’t leave enough time. Or even worse, management gets back to you with some “minor” editing changes, adding a full paragraph of narration text.

Looks like there’s no way you’ll be able to fit in all that narration without talking reallyreallyreally fast. Rather than altering the flow of your piece (or having to rerecord), consider instead performing a frame extension. Extending a frame is easy, and can be done anywhere within a clip.

1. The first half of your clip. 2. The extended frame to accommodate the extra narration. 3. The second half of your clip.

I like frame extending because it’s completely imperceptible to your audience. In the final video, a frame extension appears to the user as if you simply stopped moving the mouse for a moment to talk about the current feature, and when finished, it’s Okay, all done. Moving on…

Very natural-looking. Also very easy to forget this functionality is there^[*]. Don’t. It’ll easily become one of the handiest tools in your editing arsenal.

To extend a frame, simply follow these steps:

1. Place the seek bar on the frame you’d like to extend by clicking the appropriate spot on the time reference area. This can be anywhere in a clip, not just the beginning or end.

2. Choose Extend Frame… from the Edit menu.

   or

   Right-click the video clip in the Timeline, and then choose Extend Frame….

   or

   Press Ctrl-E.

3. In the dialog that appears, choose the number of seconds by which you’d like to extend the frame. This can be any number between 1 and 600.

4. If the frame extended was in the middle of your clip, then the original clip is automatically split in two to make room for the extension.

The extension looks and behaves as its own clip. Once created, you can drag it to any location on the Timeline. Unfortunately, frame extensions cannot be resized the way that other kinds of clips can, so if your timing is off, you must delete the extension and try again.^[*]

Adjusting Clip Speed

You may encounter rare instances where the timing of the entire clip is a bit off. Perhaps you were feeling rushed the day you recorded it, and as a result, everything is a bit too fast. I find that this happens often when a client insists on doing the actual screen recordings personally, relying on me to edit and narrate the final video. I’m almost never left with enough time to actually talk.

Or maybe the pacing is a little on the slow side, and you’re constantly waiting for an activity to finish, leaving gaping pauses in your narration. It’s also possible that you have a pretty standard clip in terms of its pacing, but you’d like to give it a time-lapse effect (either sped up or slowed down).

So what to do? You could edit out a bunch of segments within the clip to speed things up. You could do a bunch of frame extensions to slow things down. You could go back and rerecord the whole clip (possibly with the Time-lapse effect engaged). Or you can simply change your Clip Speed. Altering the clip speed essentially takes the clip you currently have and speeds up or slows down the whole thing by a certain percentage that you set.

The one drawback to this feature is that the speed-altered clip cannot be previewed in real time. During the preview, the clip will play at its original speed, and you won’t actually see the change in velocity until the final video is produced. At this point, it’s too late to do anything about it if the timing is still off. Some people are comfortable “flying blind,” and this limitation won’t bother them. I personally like to know exactly what I’m getting before producing my final video, and the following procedure for changing a clip’s speed reflects this personality quirk.

To alter the speed of a clip for your final video, follow these easy steps^[*]

1. Once you’ve identified the clip you’d like to adjust, Save your project.

2. Start a New Project, importing the clip into your Clip Bin.

3. Drag the clip onto the Timeline.

4. Choose Clip Speed… from the Edit menu.

   or

   Right-click your clip in the Timeline, and choose Clip Speed… from the context menu.

5. The Clip Speed dialog will appear:

   

   As you can see, you can select a new percentage for your clip. Enter a number less than 100% to slow it down and more than 100% to speed it up. Be careful not to ratchet it up or down too much on the first try - you’d be amazed how much difference a 10% to 20% increase/decrease can make. Once adjusted, the clip’s new duration in seconds will appear. This can be handy in situations where the clip absolutely must be x seconds long.

6. Start the Production Wizard by clicking the Produce Video As button ( ) on the Main toolbar. Click Next to bypass the Welcome page if it appears. Choose Custom production settings, and click Next.

7. In the Production Wizard, choose AVI video as your file format. Click Next to continue.

8. In the AVI Encoding Options box, you’ll probably want to uncheck the Encode Audio check box, even if your clip has an audio track. Unlike the Camtasia Recorder’s Time-lapse capture feature, adjusting the clip speed will also affect the clip’s audio, rendering your voice as either a slow, rumbling growl or a high-pitched chirp, depending on which direction you go. On the other hand, if that’s the effect you’re going for, then feel free to leave the audio on (but remember to set the audio at master level: PCM, 44.1 kHz, 16-bit mono). The color depth and frame rate are both fine at Automatic. Click Next to continue.

9. In the Video Size box, click the Largest video size (Recommended) radio button if it is not already selected. Click Next to continue.

10. In the Video Options box, make sure all check boxes are unchecked. Click Next to continue.

11. In the Marker Options box, make sure all check boxes are unchecked. Click Next to continue.

12. In the Produce Video box, enter a new name for your file. I generally keep the file name the same, but add an “SA” (short for “speed-adjusted”) tag at the end. For example: MyClipSA.avi. Click the Browse button ( ) to put your produced work in the directory of your choice. Make note of where you saved it; you’ll need this info when you import it back into your main project.

13. View the produced file and make sure that the timing is right. Repeat steps 4 to 12 if it’s not. Keep in mind that even if you execute the Clip Speed command multiple times, the number you enter is still a percentage of the original speed.

14. Reopen your main video project file. No need to save the other project; you won’t be coming back to it. Import your speed-adjusted clip into the Clip Bin.

15. Replace the original clip on the Timeline with your speed-adjusted one. Edit as needed.

This procedure, while a bit more complicated, does show an accurate reflection of the video’s total running time, and gives you a correct preview of what the speed-adjusted clip will look like within the broader scope of your final video. I’ve found that it saves time in the long run.

Viewing and Locking Your Tracks

Turning Your Tracks On and Off

Up to this point, we’ve dealt mainly with the Video track and maybe the Audio 1 track (which is the audio stream of your video files). In addition to your Video track (which includes video, image, and title clip content, and by definition, is always on), you have eight other tracks that you can turn on or off as needed. Why would you want to do this? Well, assuming you have content in several of those tracks (in our case, a big assumption, since we haven’t covered the special effects of Camtasia Studio in this book as of yet), you can switch off the tracks that don’t require your immediate attention and concentrate exclusively on those that do. In addition to freeing up a little screen real estate, turning off a track prevents you from “misclicking” and making inadvertent adjustments to a track that you didn’t really want to touch. Also, turning off unused tracks allows for better side-by-side comparison of content in the tracks you’re actively working with.

The Timeline with all tracks visible.

Note 

Note that when I say “turn on or off,” I refer only to the visibility of the track information on your Timeline, not to the track’s content in your video. In other words, I might turn off my Callouts track to give me a little more space on the Timeline, but my callouts will still show up in both the Video Preview and my final video.

When you add content to the Timeline that would reside in a track currently not visible, Camtasia Studio turns it on automatically. Any track can be turned on or off manually, regardless of whether or not it contains any content. Any content inside an “off” track is still there; it’s just hidden. To make any needed adjustments, just turn the track back on.

This is how you turn tracks on or off in Camtasia Studio:

1. On the Editing toolbar just above the Timeline, click the Tracks button.

2. A drop-down list of tracks will appear, with check marks indicating which of those tracks are currently visible. Click the name of the track you wish to turn on or off.

If you so desire (and have the space), you can give more room to your tracks by clicking and dragging on the colored border just above the Editing toolbar. When you’re in the correct spot, a dual-headed arrow (↕) will appear. Drag it upward to resize the Tracks area. Note that only the three audio tracks (Audio 1, Audio 2, and PIP Audio) expand very much when sized upward. This is done by design in order to give you a better view of the waveforms inside those tracks. The Video track will also expand by a finite amount to give you a slightly bigger view of the clips’ thumbnail images.

Locking Your Tracks

When selecting and cutting out segments, everything that falls within that selection gets cut, including video (and its corresponding audio track), markers, special effects, background audio, and any picture- in-picture video. At least by default. This default can be changed.

How does it work? Well, when editing your video, that video’s audio track and any special effects currently applied to the video are always automatically edited as well. Nothing you can do about it. They’re a package deal.

That’s not necessarily the case with your background audio, captions, and your picture-in-picture (PIP) tracks. It’s possible that you have your Audio 2 track (which, if you’ll recall, can consist of anything from background music to sound effects to post-recording narration) as well as the video and audio tracks of your PIP segments exactly synchronized with your screen video, and you therefore want any editing you do to the screen video to affect those tracks as well. On the other hand, you might not. You might want to hack and slash your video to little bits, but don’t want to see Audio 2 or your PIP tracks hacked to bits along with it. A good example of this is when you have background music in the Audio 2 track. If your video cuts affected the Audio 2 track as well, then the music would suddenly have missing pieces. It would skip over those portions cut by your video edits, with random notes or even whole measures suddenly gone. Suffice it to say, the playback of that lovely concerto you picked out for your video would be somewhat, erm… dis-concert-ing.

This is where the idea of locking tracks comes into play. You can lock a track (or group of tracks) to ensure that any editing you do as a whole won’t trim out desired content. Take a look at this Timeline, where the Audio 2 track is locked. Here’s a before-and-after shot:

With Audio 2 locked, the video edit does not affect your background music whatsoever.

You see those little locks to the left-hand side of your tracks? These are the track locks. For the purposes of locking, all nine tracks are grouped into four categories:

• Caption. As captions are usually tied to your video content, most of the time you’ll want to leave this unlocked - if a video segment gets cut, its corresponding captions should generally get the ax as well. But if you plan on keeping all the narration and just assigning it to a new video segment, you’ll then want to keep the captioning content safely locked.

• Video. This includes your Video track (obviously), as well as Audio 1, Zoom, Quiz, and Callouts. Though the Markers track appears above this group, it too is tied to the Video track.

• Audio 2. This track is used exclusively for external audio files. These sound files can consist of just about anything: music, sound effects, and post-recording narration. We’ll discuss this track in detail when we get to Chapter 10, “Working with Other Media: Audio, PIP, and Title Clips.”

• PIP. A secondary video stream, either laid over the screen video in a picture-in-picture format or laid out side-by-side. While designed for the inclusion of real-world video such as a webcam shot of a person’s face, this can be just about any video file. The PIP Audio track is much like Audio 1 in the sense that it is exclusively for the video’s audio stream. You’ll read more about creating and editing PIP material in the next two chapters.

Up to now, I’ve talked exclusively about turning off the Audio 2 and PIP track groups for the purpose of freely editing the screen video content without trimming the content in those other tracks. But keep in mind that the reverse holds true as well: You can also lock the Video track group in order to edit your Audio 2 and/or PIP content without hurting your screen video.

To lock or unlock a track group, do the following:

1. Make sure that you have at least one representative track of the desired track group visible on the Timeline. If not, turn on at least one of the tracks in the group by clicking the Tracks button on the Editing toolbar and then choosing the appropriate track.

2. Click the group’s lock icon. When locked, the icon will change to a “closed padlock” and the affected tracks will be displayed with a light gray crisscross pattern:

   

   1. Locked. 2. Unlocked.

3. Make any desired edits to the unlocked tracks.

4. If desired, click the lock icon again to unlock.

Fun with Markers

When turning on the various tracks on the Timeline, you probably noticed the Markers track appearing above the main Video track. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, “Recording Your Screen,” a marker is a placeholder that marks something noteworthy. Markers can be added both during the recording phase (see Chapter 5 for instructions on how to do this) or here in Camtasia Studio during editing. Markers can be added for any number of reasons, but their general uses in Camtasia Studio fall into three basic categories:

• To leave a note for yourself. I call these “breadcrumb markers.” Particularly if I’m working on a long-term project where I might not touch the file again for a week or more, I often use markers to remind myself of editing changes that still need to be made. For example, if I need to add a custom callout but don’t yet have the graphic image, I’ll go to that spot on the Timeline and add a marker that says “Insert x custom callout here.” When recording, I often add markers to note a new take rather than going through the hassle of stopping and restarting the Recorder. So, when I import my clip into Camtasia Studio and add it to the Timeline, the presence of markers lets me know that I should delete everything up to the most recent marker, as those sections contain takes where I screwed something up.

• To prepare a table of contents. There’s a wonderful feature in Camtasia Studio that will use your markers to create a navigational menu for your final video. Simply set a marker for each new topic in the video, naming each one appropriately. Then produce your project. After production, the user will see a menu to the left of your video that contains links, the text of which is mined from the various markers’ names. If a link is clicked, the user is brought to that exact point in the video where the marker had been placed. You’ll learn more about how to create a table of contents in Chapter 12, “The Production Process.”

• To split your video into palatable pieces. Markers can also be used for designating splits. If you have a particularly long video clip, you can set markers at key points throughout, and then have Camtasia Studio split the video at the various marker points with a single command. Once split, these clips can be reordered or otherwise edited at will.

  Additionally, if you have a reaaaally long project, to the point that exporting it as a single video becomes infeasible, you can have Camtasia Studio split the contents of your Timeline into individual video files according to markers that you set. This is done at production time, and Chapter 12, “The Production Process” explains it all.

So, now that we’ve discussed just why markers are so useful, let’s go over exactly how to perform the various tasks related to marker creation, naming, editing, deletion, etc. If you created markers at record time, they’ll automatically appear when you drag the marker-containing clip from the Clip Bin onto the Timeline. In fact, the Markers track will turn on automatically to ensure you don’t miss them.

But remember how I said that you can also add a marker right within Camtasia Studio? Here’s how to do it:

1. Place the seek bar where you’d like to add the marker by clicking the appropriate spot on the time reference area.

2. Choose Add a Marker from the Edit menu.

   or

   Press Ctrl-M.

   or

   If the Markers track is visible on your Timeline (feel free to turn it on if it’s not), right-click anywhere in the Markers track and choose Add Marker. Note the marker will be placed at the exact location of the seek bar, not at the spot where you right-clicked.

3. The Marker Name dialog opens automatically^[*]. Enter a name into the field. This can be anything, of pretty much any length, though keep in mind that there’s a finite amount of tooltip space for reading, so don’t go writing the Great American Novel on it. Also, you’ll want to keep it to just a few words if using the marker to construct a table of contents, as the text will need to fit in a column next to the video (though with most formats, this text can be set to wrap to multiple lines if necessary). Click OK.

A marker’s name doesn’t make much of a difference if you’re only using it to split up a great big file into smaller pieces. But it is important if you’re using the marker as a built-in to-do list to remind yourself of work to be done. And it’s really, really important if you’re creating markers for a table of contents. After all, the names of your markers are what will be taken as your link text.

A marker will be placed at the point of the seek bar. It looks like a little green diamond. If you mouse over the marker, you can find out a little information about it, such as the timing of the marker as well as its name.

Note that you can name/rename a marker at any point by double- clicking it, or by right-clicking and choosing Set Marker Name.

Moving, Deleting, and Syncing to Markers

Before we can start executing any high-level commands with our markers, you’ll need a few more nuts-and-bolts techniques for manipulating them. Fortunately, your markers are very easily manipulated.

Here are three fun methods of having your way with markers:

• Move ’em. You can move a marker around by clicking and dragging its diamond anywhere on the Timeline.

• Delete ’em. To get rid of a marker, simply click it once and then press the Delete key.

  or

  Right-click the marker, and then choose Delete from Timeline.

  or

  To get rid of all markers at once, choose Remove All Markers from the Edit menu.

• Sync to ’em. To sync the seek bar to the exact spot of your marker, simply click on the marker.

  or

  Right-click the marker, and then choose Move to this Marker (though frankly, this seems like unnecessary work to me).

In addition to clicking in order to sync the seek bar to a marker, you can actually move it from marker to marker with two special commands: one for moving forward and one for going backward:

Open table as spreadsheet

Name	Menu Command	Hotkey
Previous Marker	Play > Previous Marker	Ctrl-[
Next Marker	Play > Next Marker	Ctrl-]

These commands will cycle through your markers, meaning that when you hit the last marker and execute the Next Marker command again, it’ll go back to the first marker. You can also execute these commands regardless of whether or not the playback head is in motion (though it will stop once you do).

Splitting Up Your Timeline Using Markers

Remember when I said that you can split one or more clips into a bunch of individual clips using your markers? Once you have your markers set up, it can all be done with a single command. Keep in mind that it does this for each and every marker on your Timeline - unfortunately, you cannot simply pick and choose which markers will receive a split and which won’t.

What’s the benefit of this? Well, if you’re working with particularly long clips with a variety of topics in each one, splitting according to your markers will allow you to adjust the order of these topics rather than being stuck with the order in which you recorded it. You can also perform other clip-specific edits such as adjusting the clip speed of one topic, while leaving the others alone.

To split your Timeline content according to your markers, do the following:

1. Create all your markers, double-checking each one to ensure that they’re all placed exactly where you want them.

2. Choose Split at All Markers from the Edit menu.

This procedure effectively creates a series of clips according to your markers. These individual clips behave just as if you had conducted a series of manual splits, allowing you to move them around, perform individual edits, and resize them (both reducing and expanding). I find that creating markers to conduct splits alone doesn’t really save you any more time than splitting them manually does, but if you already have the markers in place for another reason, the ability to split at all marker points can be a great help.

Note 

Before closing out the section on markers, I want to draw your attention to the fact that the commands for creating a table of contents as well as splitting your Timeline content by markers are both executed during production. We’ll discuss these items in detail when we get to Chapter 12, “The Production Process.”

^[*]If you’re recording narration with the Voice Narration tool, keep in mind that frame extensions can also be done (more easily in fact) by using the tool’s Extend Current Frame feature, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 10.

^[*]That is, frame extensions of video clips cannot be resized. You can perform frame extension on image clips as well, and those extensions can be resized. But since an image clip can be drastically resized in either direction, anyway, why would you want to perform a frame extension on it in the first place?

^[*]These steps include procedures we haven’t yet covered, such as producing a video. While I’ve attempted to guide you through this uncharted terrain in a stepwise, tunnel-vision manner, please refer to those portions of the book if you get stuck.

^[*]If you don’t like the fact that the Marker Name dialog automatically opens every time you add a marker because it disrupts your “marker-adding groove,” you can turn this capability off by going to Tools > Options, and then unchecking Prompt for text when adding Markers from the Program tab.