Solicited Review: Techsmith Camtasia 2021

Okay, folks, this is a quick review and look at what's new in Tech Smith's Camtasia 2021. Full disclosure, FTC requirements. Uh I am a Camtasia uh TechSmith ambassador stuff. So they gave me a copy of it for free. So uh you have to put that out there.

It's a solicited review. So what's new in Camtasia? If you've been using it for any amount of time, uh, you know that it's essentially a non-linear editor that is somewhere between the between iMovie and Adobe Premiere, right? It's not nearly as sophisticated as Adobe Premiere, um, which is good because Adobe Premiere is kind of like you know using a rocket ship. Uh, and then it's not as overly simplified as iMovie, where you can not not do a whole lot.

So it's right in that middle zone where it's got a nice sweet spot. And I find it especially useful for building training videos and stuff. There's a lot of integrations for creating learning and development. But in the new version, there's a lot of good stuff in here. Um a bunch of things that are new.

So let's look at a few of the features that I personally find useful and I think are valuable. Um the first by far is what's called proxy video. Proxy video is uh what you do. This is again something that the bigger NLEs like Premiere do. They it helps you create a uh scaled down uh version of a video to minimize its size and editing.

It's basically a low res version. And the creation of that means that you can drag and drop it in the timeline, play it, test effects and stuff. And if your computer is slower, uh or you don't have uh you know, a great graphics card, it makes it a little bit easier to work with, right? So when you load your video clips in, you'll set them all to convert proxy video and then go get a sandwich because it is doing some encoding to turn these videos into lower res videos for editing, and then when you go and hit render, when you export the video, it'll render obviously with the complete full version, but you'll be able to edit a little bit easier. So that's number one.

Uh, very, very useful. Number two, uh they had a lot of uh transitions. So one of the things that uh people have been critical in the past was there wasn't a ton of transitions, and and that's okay. Um look, transitions are like hot sauce, right? A little bit goes a long way.

Um, for those who remember the early days of video editing, and we first got our hands on avid systems and stuff, there were a lot of these transitions in there, and we all be honest, we all made that one video where we used every single transition in one video, right? We've all been there, we've all done that. Um, there are a lot of really good new transitions in here. Um, uh some favorites and things are the digital version uh where it sort of pixelates the screen out, which I think is kind of neat, is a fun effect here. Um there's now probably a transition that matches what you want to do.

Now, the one thing that I wish was in here uh was the ability to stack transitions to be able to use multiple transitions on the same clip. Right now, you can't do that. So if you want to have an effect that's layered, like a zoom and a digital at the same time, you've got to do one transition on a clip, render it, then import that rendered clip in and then apply the second transition to it. If somebody knows how to do stacked transitions without doing that step, please leave something in the comments and tell me because I would love to know how to do that. But there's a ton of new transitions again.

Remember, remember transitions are hot sauce. Please don't go overboard on them. A little bit goes a long way. Uh other things that are in here that are really nice. Uh, there is now a motion blur uh visual effect.

Uh, motion blur allows you to you can see here just a little animation, it smooths out the effects and makes it look more natural. So for a lot of the rendered effects, including a lot of the transitions and things, uh, as well as you know, swiping in uh like logos and stuff in and out of the screen, it makes them less janky, it makes them look a little bit more natural, which is nice. Now, two of the things I think are really helpful. Um is the well, actually, I think by the most important of all is there's there's corner rounding, which will make you know uh things like uh collages and stuff little look a little bit more natural. So let's put some media on the timeline here.

Uh here I'll just zoom into this and then take this clip here, and let's so I can take this clip here and let's go ahead and apply visual effect, uh slap some corner rounding on it. Yeah, I can take the corners in a lot, and now I get us. You can see here it's rounded uh that edge. So I can make uh like little fly-ins and stuff like that. I could have this be uh a nice little effect there.

Let's go ahead and put an animation on this and actually do a behavior. Let's do a fly-in. Do a quick check here. Boom, and then for that, let's also apply our motion blur. You can see we have corner rounding and motion blur, so you can stack the visual effects.

You can't stack the transitions, um, which is is unfortunate. Uh, and then just a quick, you can see how you see as it's zoomed in there. You can see that nice motion blur that it applies. Looks really nice. More important though is ducking.

Ducking, for those who are unfamiliar, when you have two pieces of audio, um, generally speaking, you don't want them on the same volume, right? You it gets tough to listen to. So let's go ahead and toss in some music here. If I were to play this right now, you can see from a uh a volume scale, they're both playing it's essentially the same volume. So this would be a challenging to listen to.

This is a video I'm doing in the middle of editing a video about uh grilling, and what I would want to do is I would want to hear you know that grilling sound, right? There's no point in having a grilling video if you can't hear the you know, hear the sizzle. Um, so there's a new audio effect. Uh let's go to audio effects called emphasize audio, right? This is auto ducking.

You just slap it on, and then it's going to uh ramp your main track to to be 80% of the volume, and then take everything else down to 20%. And you can change that in um in the settings here in the panels, but this makes ducking super easy because you can now do it also on a per clip basis. Um, so if you want to emphasize one clip here, let's go ahead and split and then split again. And then I want to go and switch maybe to my voiceover. I can now auto-duck the grilling in this section of the of the clip.

So we don't have to track duck, which is what you see a lot in in uh really good audio programs like um Adobe Audition, for example. You can duck one track and change it. This is now taking it down to the clip level, which is really cool because I can duck in and out different sections. If somebody's speaking, for example, I have two speaker tracks, and one speaker's got some background noise. I could silence that, but if I want it to still sound a little bit uh natural, I can just duck back and forth between them based on who's speaking at the same time.

So really, really helpful. If you are a video person and you know what to do with them, uh, you have color L U Ts, which is a uh fast types of uh color correction setting, which again really nice. Uh nice to have some of these more pro features showing up in the application. So there's a lot of good stuff in here in terms of what's available uh for folks who have who know what the the buttons do, frankly. Um but for me, the emphasize audio effect is killer.

Uh the motion blur is nice, uh the rounding corners is cute, and the transitions are nice. Um, but really that emphasize audio, especially if you are taking if you're doing stuff with your video that has multiple media purposes, it's so important. So, what do I mean? Uh every week uh my uh my colleague and and co-founder Katie Robert and I do a podcast, right? Uh the In Ear Insights Podcast.

And be with this podcast, it's we record it in in StreamYard because we want it to be able to have the multiple camera views and stuff really easy. And then I take that into Camtasia and I do the editing here. With the auto ducking, you know, the emphasize audio effect and all the other things. I can sequence in all the audio I want and then export the video and export the audio as an MP3 to make my podcast, which is fantastic. So now that we have some more pro audio features in here, it takes out additional steps afterwards, right?

We all we already have the audio compression uh in here, which is is decent. We have some noise removal. Now with ducking, we're one step closer to being able to use Camtasia pretty much for everything, uh, and and use fewer tools in the process. So there's a lot of good stuff in Camtasia 2021. There's all a bunch of stuff that for folks who are doing brand stuff where you um you have a custom assets, uh, you can share assets with your team and stuff.

I don't really use that because it's literally just me doing all the editing. But if you did have that, you would be able to do it within the application. Um, and you can also do um consolidation of all your stuff into you know standalone project files, so you can lump them all together. Like when I was assembling this uh this project, I now have I could do um uh good to have all these little snippets instead and not have to provide the source video files, it all just comes you know lumped in all at once. It looks like my uh my media file here has finished uh rendering itself for and you can see it's it's now proxied.

Let's go ahead and slap that in. And you can see it's definitely is lower resolution, but it also scrubs faster. You if you you look here, and I s when I uh scrub through this video, you can see it stutters because it's the full resolution video. And here, when I scrub through this, this scrubs a lot faster. Right.

So that's that proxy video working, uh, doing a really nice job of making it smooth to preview what's going on. If I hit play on this, you know, looks good, nice full motion. And then on the so you still get the full motion because that's not a particularly large video clip. If your videos are on a mechanical hard drive, the proxy video is really important because the access times typically are slower than like on an SSD. So on your depending on technology setup, you may be using proxy video a lot.

Remember with proxy video, if you're gonna use it and if it's a big editing project, give yourself time for the proxy videos to render, right? So maybe uh if you've got all your source footage, uh you load it up and set it to proxy and then you go to lunch, right? Or you do it the night before a big editing day so that's all ready for you. You don't have to wait for it to render. Because that took about you know probably five-ish minutes to render a clip that is only about I think two minutes long to scale it down and make it ready for for proxy editing.

So that's what's new in uh in Camtasia 2021. If you want to check out, go to TrustInsights.ai slash Camtasia. Full disclosure, it's an affiliate link. And uh uh my company, Trust Insights does get a uh non-zero not big, but non-zero commission. Uh thank you for your support of uh the company and uh of you know create videos like this.

Uh as always, uh please subscribe to wherever it is you're watching this. Uh hit the notification bell if you're watching this on new on YouTube. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Need help making your marketing platforms, processes, and people work smarter?

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