Importing and Using Your Media Clips in Camtasia Studio


Okay, we’ve got some clips we want to work with, but in order to do anything with them in Camtasia Studio, we have to import them first. Even if you’re not sure you’re going to use a particular clip, it’s best to import and have it at your fingertips should you end up needing it.

image from book

To import one or more clips into Camtasia Studio,dothe following:

  1. From the Welcome dialog (that little box that appeared when you first opened the program), click Start a new project by importing media files.

    or

    From the Add section of the Task List, click Import media….

    or

    Choose File > Import Media….

    or

    Click the Import Media Files button on your toolbar.

    or

    Right-click within the Clip Bin, and then choose Import Media… from the context menu that appears.

    or Press Ctrl-I.

  2. In the dialog that appears, select the media file you wish to import. You can select multiple files by clicking and dragging, or by Ctrl-clicking on individual items. You may also either narrow your search to a particular media type or include all media types by making an appropriate choice from the Files of type drop-down list.

    image from book

  3. Click Open.

image from book

With no fewer than six different ways of doing the same thing, do you get the sense that perhaps this is a really important command? Notice that all the clips you imported now show up in the Clip Bin. Don’t worry if you missed a clip or you have need for various clips located in different directories. You may continue to import at will without losing anything currently located in the Clip Bin.

Utilizing the Clip Bin

The Clip Bin holds five categories of media:

  • Camtasia Recording File. These are the CAMREC files you recorded. They’re in a different category than your standard videos due to the different media streams they contain (or perhaps I should say can contain - you need to have actually recorded those streams in order for them to be present).

  • Title Clip. No more having to assemble a title screen using a huge, cumbersome image editing package and then importing it as an image. Camtasia Studio offers a one-stop workshop for constructing title and ending screens, and I’ll show you how to add these in Chapter 10.

  • Image. If, for example, you wish to use Camtasia Studio to create a slide show out of a series of still image files, you can easily do so. Still images also work well for displaying charts, diagrams, and contact information.

  • Audio. If you have background music, sound effects, or narration that you recorded outside of the Camtasia Recorder, you can add it to your video project.

  • Video. These files can be real-world camera video or animations, including your picture-in-picture (PIP) video. Additionally, if you recorded to AVI while working in the Camtasia Recorder, then these clips will mostly consist of all the wonderful screen video footage that you captured. If you captured narration or mouse/key- board sound effects at the same time, the audio track will be imported as well.

Each type of media has its own category in the Clip Bin, and all media of a particular type are neatly arranged within that category in alphabetical order (by default, anyway). Depending on the number of clips you have imported, you may want to make a little additional elbow room for them - the width of the Clip Bin can be adjusted by clicking and dragging the left edge of the preview area.

image from book

Keep in mind that you can view the contents of your Clip Bin in different ways. These view options can be accessed in one of two places:

  • Choose View, and then the Clip Bin submenu.

    or

  • Right-click within the Clip Bin area.

image from book

You have three basic sets of choices for altering your Clip Bin view:

  • Thumbnails vs. Details. By default, the Clip Bin displays your clips in Thumbnail view, meaning that each clip is represented by a miniature image of the content (except for audio, which gets a generic icon), with the clip’s file name appearing underneath. But you can also set your Clip Bin to display in Details view, which has the advantages of (a) fitting more clip information into a smaller area, thus reducing or eliminating the need to scroll, and (b) providing additional useful information about the clips, such as size, dimensions (for images and videos), and duration (for audio and video).

  • Sort order. As I mentioned earlier, the icons appear alphabetically by default. But you have several additional sort orders at your disposal, including size, type, dimensions, and duration. Choosing the same item twice will sort your content according to that sort option, but in descending order. In addition to the options listed above, you may also specify the sort order within the Details view by clicking on any heading.

  • Show in Groups. Whatever sort order you choose, your Clip Bin items are sorted by media type. If you’d prefer that the Clip Bin ignore this distinction and simply lump all your media together, you may do so by unchecking Show in Groups.

If you’ve inadvertently added a clip that you know you won’t be using, you can get rid of it by right-clicking the clip and then choosing Remove from Clip Bin or by simply selecting the clip and pressing Delete.

Note 

CAMREC files, while extremely useful in Camtasia Studio because they neatly package several streams into one file, don’t play nicely with other third-party software applications. If you want to be able to use your CAMREC video with other programs, you’ll need to pull out the AVI video (and possibly the WMV file of your PIP track) contained in the file. Fortunately, Camtasia Studio includes a built-in extractor tool. Just right-click any of your CAMREC files, and choose Extract Camrec Contents…. You’ll be prompted to choose a folder where the AVI file will be saved. It’s possible to extract several files at once by selecting several CAMREC files before executing the command. You can also extract one or more streams from a CAMREC file in the Windows Explorer by right-clicking it and choosing the appropriate option from the Extract submenu.

Previewing Your Clips

So what good are these handy little clips sitting in the Clip Bin? From here, you’ve got two choices regarding what to do with a clip: You can view it directly or you can add it to your Timeline/Storyboard for inclusion in your final video. If you wish to preview any clip in the Clip Bin, simply give it a double-click. Alternatively, you can also right-click the clip, and then choose Preview Clip. The selected clip will display right within the preview area. For video and audio files, you’ll be able to use the playback controls to play, pause, stop, and otherwise move the playback head around. You’ll also be able to see the elapsed time of the clip as well as its overall duration.

Want even more information about a particular clip than what is visible in the preview area? You can also view a particular clip’s properties. Just right-click the clip, and then choose Properties… from the context menu that appears.

image from book

Here are the properties of one of my CAMREC clips. For audio, images, and title clips, you’ll see a different set of properties.

You’ll find different kinds of information based on the type of clip selected, but the Properties dialog can include things like file size, duration, dimensions, when the file was last modified, etc.

Adding a Clip to the Timeline or Storyboard

It’s important to note that the presence of certain media in the Clip Bin does not automatically mean they’ll be part of your video - it only means that they’re available to you if and when you wish to use them. To actually include these elements in your final video, you will need to add them to the Timeline or Storyboard. The Timeline and Storyboard offer two different ways of viewing your content. The Timeline view is the default view of Camtasia Studio. This view shows the different elements in your video as part of its total duration:

image from book

The Storyboard view, in contrast, shows the individual video and image clips in chronological succession, as if they were index cards:

image from book

In the next section, we’ll talk a lot more about these two views, the purpose of each, how to work within them, their limits, etc. What’s important for this section is that you know how to effectively add clips to both views.

image from book

Without further ado, this is how you move your clips out of the Clip Bin and into the spotlight:

  • Right-click the desired clip in your Clip Bin, and choose Add to Timeline (or Add to Storyboard, depending on which view you have enabled). The clip will automatically be placed after all the other clips currently in your project.

    or

  • Click and hold on your desired clip, dragging it down onto the Storyboard or Timeline. In both views, you can specify the chronological order.

    image from book

    Here I am dragging a clip to my Timeline. If I drop the clip here, it will appear between my title clip and Views.avi.

    If you have other clips already in your video, you can drop the current clip at the beginning or end of the sequence, or any point in between, depending on where your mouse cursor is when you release the button.

image from book

Note 

Audio clips do not show up on the Storyboard. If you’re in Storyboard view and you attempt to add an audio clip to your video, it will automatically switch to Timeline view.

Keep in mind that you can add multiple clips to either the Timeline or Storyboard at once. Just select all the clips you want to add from the Clip Bin. Any standard method of multiple file selection will work here:

  • To select a sequence of clips, click and drag an area over your clips to select them.

    or

  • Click the first clip in the sequence, then Shift-click on the last clip.

    or

  • To select/deselect individual clips, Ctrl-click on them.

Then simply follow either of the methods for adding clips to the Time- line or Storyboard discussed above. The order in which the clips will be added is taken directly from whatever sort order is currently in effect in your Clip Bin, so it behooves you to sort your Clip Bin content in the order that most closely approximates your desired video order before adding them to your video.




Camtasia Studio 4. The Definitive Guide
Camtasia Studio 4: The Definitive Guide (Wordware Applications Library)
ISBN: 1598220373
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 146
Authors: Daniel Park

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net