Solicited Review: What’s New in Camtasia 2020 For Marketers

In today's episode, we are reviewing Camtasia, the new Camtasia 2020 from uh TechSmith. This is the most uh recent version of this software. If you're unfamiliar with it, Camtasia is a video editor. It is a video editor, it's optimized for uh e-learning, for presentations, for doing stuff that would take a lot longer in software like Adobe Premiere, for example. Camtasia's strengths are all about getting things up and running easily so that you can get video produced faster.

Um we're not gonna cover the basics. The basics just know that it can take in a fair number of video sources, has uh cameras, it has the ability to record your screen and screencast, uh, has the ability to take in decent audio sources. Let's talk about what's new in Camtasia 2020. First thing that's new are these are templates. So templates, the ability to share templates is huge for uh marketers in particular because we have to do things like adhere to style guides.

Uh and if we can hand a pre-packaged template to a team member to a vendor, and say, here's the things that I need you to do, your agency or whatever, it greatly simplifies the process and makes it a whole lot easier for uh for us to be able to get what we want. So from here, for example, we would save this project as a template. We'll call it test. I believe I have one named that already. Yep.

Yes, from place existing template. And then if I wanted to, I could then take that template, share it, or create a new project from it. And there's my test uh template that has all the pieces from this existing uh thing. I've you've got my titles, I've got my uh background music. Uh in here, in these templates, you can also add things like placeholders.

So you can uh drop a placeholder there. So if you've got instructions for a uh an agency, like hey, I need you to put this media here, you can actually name uh these placeholder slots. Put silly here, please. And that will give great instructions to people to say, like, here's what you're supposed to do. So very good for any kind of process-oriented shop where you want to get stuff done quickly.

Second, if you've ever used Camtasia, you know there's a lot of menus in here. There's a lot of lot of menus. One of the nice new things in here is the ability to uh take anything at click start and turn it into a favorite, and then instead of having to go through or 13 menus, uh, you have everything you need that you use frequently in one spot. So you can see I use uh certain annotation type, uh I have my fades, my cursor highlights, audio compression, all the things the the basics that I need, so I don't have to keep jumping around menus for daily shows like you ask I answer. Very straightforward.

Presets and themes are also really nice. So one of the things that you can do here is if I have a certain font that's part of my uh style, like corporate style, uh, I can add that font to my theme, and then when I look at my theme, let's go to the default theme here. This is the trust insights one. So I've got my fonts preset, I've got my logo preset again. Keeping it simple, making it easy for me to stay on style, which again, huge.

Even if you don't have a corporate style guide, you have to adhere to, just having those presets in place saves you a ton of time. Uh, there are, if you hadn't noticed, uh, when I do new project from template, also plenty of uh existing themes, you know, tutorials, screencasts that will help both help you learn it and also if you just want to get up and running quickly. Let's do uh this new template here. It didn't work as expected. Oh, there it is.

And you can see where the uh go away. There we go. You can see there's all sorts of different placeholders to help somebody learn just how to use the software appropriately, putting the appropriate media, the overlays, the things that you want. Again, if you don't have existing templates, this is a great way to get up and running quickly. Let's go ahead and move on to the next thing.

Packages. Again, this is for those of us who work with coworkers who work with agencies, the ability to take our templates, our themes, uh, our libraries, our any shortcuts, our presets, and export them all as one single package that we can then hand to a coworker, an agency, etc. Super helpful for getting up and running quickly. Some other things that I think are really handy, and this is gonna come into play for anybody who's doing any kind of uh slides or any kind of presentations where you want seamless video. There's a new thing called magnetic tracks.

So let me turn on a magnetic track here. What a magnetic track does is let's take a video clip here. I take this video clip, I just drag it on the track and it snaps it all the way to the left. Take a let's take another one uh clip here. And again, this is very helpful if I just want to get things glued together quickly.

If I've got five or six pieces of video, I just want to snap them together. I drag them in. If I delete one of these clips, everything auto-ripples to the left. Which again, if you don't want gaps between clips that then screw up your transitions, it's a great thing to do. Turn that track d off.

One other thing that I like a lot is uh ripple cut and ripple delete. So if I select this here and I ripple delete, it will essentially take away sp the stuff from the timeline uh in that space and move the timeline to the left. Which again, if you've got 40 slides in a presentation that you're trying to put together and you delete one of them, you don't want to then have to go and drag all you know 15 on the right hand side uh to snap them together. You can use either a magnetic track or ripple cuts and deletes to glue stuff together. So big time saver for uh making sure your presentations look okay.

Now, some things that are not in the box that uh are either useful or should be in the box. Uh number one is if you get the uh the free account uh on Tech Smith's website, you then get access to libraries of motion graphics. You can see here there's all sorts of you know fun little things, transitions and stuff that if you want to use these presets uh you can find lots and lots of goodies. They have intros, outros, uh graphics, uh presets. Um trying to figure out what other uh they have uh stock footage.

You can pay for that. There is a subscription you can buy. Um, I typically have not. I have just gone and looked for you know the free stuff that's available. I like motion backgrounds a lot.

You can you'll see some of these. Uh I guess you'll see many of these in some of the videos that I do. Um, so that's helpful. Two things that are not in the box that I wish were. Number one is a converter for FFmpeg.

So if you're not familiar, FFmpeg is an open source tool that takes pretty much any media format and converts it to any other media format. When you download stuff from, like say YouTube, you're gonna get videos in unusual formats, uh Web M, MKV, etc. Camtasia can't import those. Uh it it doesn't know what to do with them because in a lot of cases they're they're really wacky weird formats. So one of the tools that you would need to do use is a tool called FFmpeg.

And I go to the desktop here. If I type in FFmpeg and I want to take any existing file from you know MP4 or MKV, I can turn it to uh an MP4 file, which is what Camtasia uh ingests by native natively, and and build and turn convert that. So that's something that you'll want to add. FFMPEG is free, it's open source, but it is at the command line, so there's a little bit of a learning curve. Second thing that I wish was in the box that isn't, there's no countdown counter on the video recorder.

And I wish there was. I use one called Termdown, which is just in a little terminal window. There's a gazillion and a half apps. This helps keep us on track for things like how long should this video be? Because some formats like LinkedIn, 10 minutes is the max.

You don't want to go over that. So that's Camtasia 2020 in a nutshell. You can get a free trial from TrustInsights.ai slash Camtasia. Uh disclosure this is a solicited review. Any purchase you make benefits my company.

Trust insights, which in turn benefits me financially. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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