I recently created a new voiceover series called DriveThruVO — which I’m testing out on other platforms.
But for LinkedIn and my #instructionaldesign folks, I did a BTS video since I made it with #Camtasia !
Here is the video in question:
#DriveThruVO Episode 01:
If you’re looking to step up your own #videoediting game, this is a look into my thought process. It’s a little “stream of consciousness,” but I think it might be helpful to see how the digital sausage is made so-to-speak.
Transcript below!
#instructionaldesigners#instructionaldesigner#videoediting#video#elearning#elearningdevelopment
Transcription:
So I did it, I started diving into the world of tic toc. And the way that I wanted to do this was by creating bite-sized voiceover tips because voiceover has become such an essential part of my life and career. So, yeah, I wanted to give back to the masses now that I’ve gone through a lot of growing pains. And I did it with Camtasia of all things. You know, I’ve been diving a bit more into Premiere. But for this particular instance, I wanted to use Camtasia. So I’m going to painstaking. I’m gonna go through every painstaking detail regarding what I did, how I did it, et cetera. Note, this particular video is unscripted. It is a bit stream of consciousness. And it is meant to be a portfolio piece. And a way to explain to other video editors and voice actors, what I do, how I do it, why I’m thinking about it this way. So first and foremost, I started off with a script, probably my biggest piece of advice, you should start with a script as well. And then I recorded that script and brought that audio into Camtasia.
It usually starts at the bottom, but usually, by the end, it floats up toward the top. Because I like to edit my captions and my audio together. I’m going to assume that you’ve watched this video already. So I’m not going to replay it here. But I am going to go through step by step to show you what I did at each phase of the video. So starting off with just a simple fade-in with my logo.
And then as that logo goes forward, once we have a bit of an introduction, just a few seconds, we zoom it right to the bottom. And as it zooms to the bottom, I have this really cool, fast food animation come in. Now I didn’t make this fast food animation. This came from Envato elements as most of the things did in this particular video, if you are not an Envato elements user, I pity you because Envato elements is amazing. With that said, I also have a couple of bits of text fly in and I’m using specific behaviors to make them fly in the way they do grow for this one, and I think grow for this one as well. Yeah, they’re both different. They have different fonts. But they’re both using the Grow behavior coming in. I didn’t change anything on the during phase, even though I normally change this to none. And I have it shrink on the way out. The only thing I didn’t particularly like about this animation is one I didn’t have any lead in time. So I extended this frame backwards. And as it zips out, it zipped out rather slowly. So I chopped it right there added some Clip Speed, and made it just kind of exit a bit faster with tick tock time is your biggest real estate, mental real estate, I don’t know, time is of the essence when you’re doing a Tiktok fade that logo out. And then one thing you may notice is that I have shapes all the way through here Camtasia. And I’m assuming most video editors only allow you to pick one central background color. And in this case, it was white for me. Now also too, I have custom dimensions instead of your standard 1920 by 1080. I have 1080 by 1920. So yeah, tick tock flips it. You know, I’ve always been a person who said that vertical video is a sin. But you know, hey, this is the way the world is moving. So that’s that’s where we’re at. As we transition between video clips, I will change the background to suit the color. And usually I just drop into the shape, go to the Color Picker here, use the eyedropper and select something close to the border of whatever’s on the screen. So that way it sort of matches whatever is going on. The thing is because Tiktok is so new and so much video is recorded landscape and not portrait, you know, it’s not going to fit super well. Anyway, with that being said, let’s get moving. This is just another video I stole from Envato elements. And by stole I mean I do pay for I like to say stole just because I think it’s cute. Anyway, so this is a lady recording on her microphone. In fact, I think I have that microphone. But yeah, we’re just doing a slow sweep here using a custom animation, easing in and easing out not linear. And then they both transition at the same time the background and my forefront image. And I’m using one of Camtasia has built in transitions. It’s a glitch or a TV sort of image. I think this one actually is called glitch yet glitch two and I use that because I am fading into a TV. Now this is another frame that I picked up from Envato elements but you can also but this spider man the animated series from the 90s clip, infamous in the voiceover community for being very overreacted. Even though that voice actor is pretty good generally, I think he just maybe had a poorly directed session that day. I basically did a color removal on this TV because it was chroma key green in the middle here. Dropped that video layer in the background and resized it to fit the TV. then group them together so I could edit them all at
Once you know reposition, it makes sure it was centered, et cetera, et cetera, another sort of glitchy transition out to because we’re still in TV mode. And then this kid doing the shrug. Nothing too crazy here, just kind of matching the background as close as I can to this sort of pinkish red. And then we slide into this meme in this meme doesn’t quite fit the TIC tock frame. So it kind of squeezed it down a bit. And I also did an animation to kind of bring it in. So it wasn’t just, you know, transitioning to something static, there was a bit of movement here, like, boom, we’re dropping this on the canvas. This was a font that I also picked up from Envato elements. I don’t plan on using it anywhere else. But if you do pick up fonts from Envato elements, make sure that you renew your license and download it again, this also was another behavior, this is kind of a trick that I picked up from other YouTube videos, if you do fly in and you do full speed, and you play with the offset a bit do text first to last, it kind of has this typewriter effect, which is kind of what I was going for. The only thing is, is that sometimes you will get one of these artifacts here, I’m gonna go frame by frame, this is a letter flying in from from the screen. So yeah, just be be aware that the typewriter effect is not perfect, but it’s good when you’re moving fast, then just kind of doing a Ken Burns slow moving effect on this meme. So we have some movement, in not just a static image, another fade, I think this one’s just a drop down sort of fade, or behavior. Now it’s a drop down,
transition to this clown guy, counting his money and then getting it stolen, as this visual represents what I’m talking about in the video. Moving along. Same deal here, I don’t have a transition on this one on these two, I just have hard cuts, I do switch the backgrounds with the video clips, and other hard cut there as well. And this one i i actually messed up, I should have probably put this one on top. So you get this kind of weird fade that I don’t love.
It’s not terrible. I kind of like the flicker effect. But it was unintentional. This links thing also came from Envato. Lots of stuff comes from Envato. And really that’s kind of the moral of this video is you can create content like this using mixed and matched stock footage, and it’s effective. And as long as the content is good. This is a really good way to help people burn this information that you’re giving them into their brains by associating it with something visual. Moving right along, we’re going to fade back to black. And then come back in talking about that this is not a gear post. This sketch motion X is inherently in Camtasia, and under annotations, and then under this little squiggly here, I can choose all sorts of things, how thick this line is how fast I want it to draw all that stuff. Then I have my funny lizard laughing because I’m making a pun. This is not a gear post, I’m using a big gear, I just had the lizard fly in from the left. And I repeat this gift multiple times. And so repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, you can see that being represented by the squares here. And because I want this all to be treated like a single item, even though I’m looping a gift, a gift, I decided to Ctrl G and group this together.
Moving along still, we change the shape, background color again. And we have text, same font, same sort of effect, using the behavior of grow. And then I also picked up this actor performing image from you guessed it in Votto and we use the hinge behavior to pop this person on screen, hinge him up, and then hinge down. And then we’re essentially rinsing and repeating here. I’ve got cool grandma with her money fan. That’s awesome. We change here kind of a hard cut. And then we sort of zoom in real fast. This was kind of fun, because I actually went to inspect the element in Chrome and change these things because I didn’t send blah, blah, blah, mp3. The role wasn’t something that violated copyright and the project is doesn’t matter, it probably won’t get finished. These are all sort of inside jokes in the voiceover community. And I actually went and edited the HTML using Chrome Inspect guy a lot, you know, not a terribly hard trick to do but I think surprisingly effective. Because I wanted to draw the eye to this joke. I added a little bit of a blur on top here, but I faded that blur in so as we hit the email is clear and we slowly blur out the rest of that stuff. Hopefully subconsciously drawing your eye to this joke. Anyway, I don’t know if that worked. I think it did. I mean it did for me but who knows if it worked for others anyway, hard cut to these two kids reading theater pieces. Fade to the next bit. Same sort of deal text with a behavior attached to it. Broken up
In ways that makes sense, you know by word or words. To do that you will click in and then you shift enter instead of just enter. Same deal here, we got a snippet of this website, the background matches the background of the website. No Ken Burns effect here because it’s just on for a couple of seconds. Another fade. Same thing with voice acting club, another quick zoom, another sketch motion, signaling what I’m talking about in another one of these typewriter effects, as sort of a little joke here as I’m talking, not really great instructional design practice to have an inside joke going a while while I’m talking. But once again, time is money. Now I’m not getting paid for this. Anyway, fader
talking about my next resource we’re sliding in from the right, that is another behavior that I’m just tacking on to this screenshot. It is the sliding behavior. He’s in and out during I think I probably change this to none. Most of these behaviors have a during behavior, which kind of is annoying and distracting in most instances. So I just often change it to none. And then on the out, we slide out, right, because we came in left fade out again, same deal here, we just faded in this YouTube list that I recorded. So I typed this into YouTube use the screen recorder to get something that I could visually represent this with did a slow scroll down, there are no effects going on here. This is literally just video scrolling down the screen. And me talking about it. Same deal here. Same thing with the text, adding a behavior. A lot of this is just kind of repeating techniques as I go to get down this list. fade back out, fade back in casting call club, we do a slow pan left. So from left to right. And I love these Camtasia 2022 cursor effects. I have an animation here, rotating it left and then clicking this button to signify that I click this button to get to this next page. And that’s my friend Sue. So I decided to pop in a Hi Sue real quick, same thing, text behavior, quick in quick out sort of a joke. But really, the hero here is this cursor animation effect, it just looks so good. And it’s such a great addition to the 2022 version of Camtasia.
Moving along, I think we’re almost done.
Fade all of this stuff out and bring in all the resources from before I think I literally just went back in the video and copied and pasted everything resized it to be similar, aligned them in such a way that was mostly pleasing, I did have a little extra space down here. So shame on me for not addressing that. Feed them all out. And then I basically just take the same intro from the beginning and reverse it, I start with the fast food and the title and the Bite Size vo tips, zoom it out and then bring my logo in with a couple of social media tags. And then we fade that out. And I think I’ve actually saved both of these as library items, Intro outro. So that way when I make the next one, I’m just ready to go. I don’t have to rebuild this or think about it again.
Another important element is the music. I always bring in music last. I like to have my recordings done, I like to have everything synced up, you know, because even though I record all the video ahead of time, it doesn’t always timeout exactly the way I record it. So for example, I recorded this introductory phrase, and then went right into this next one. But I couldn’t pass up this joke here. So I had to split it and give it a bit of a space. If I had done that with music already there that would kind of mess things up. But with my music, I generally always start out with the music at 100%. Here, I’ll add a couple of
essentially keyframes little nodules there. And I’ll drop the music down to about 10%. If I’m talking over it Camtasia does have a really cool audio effect of emphasize which is basically just a ducking, if you’re talking, but I prefer to do it manually ducking is cool, it’s fast. But I’m kind of picky and I like to have full control over everything. And I usually just ride that throughout most of the video. If there’s any dead space, I’ll bring it back up maybe to about 80% 70% Just to kind of fill some dead air but you know, this is just a video of me talking so all the way through a couple more keyframes and then at the end, I don’t bring it back up to 100 I bring it back up to around 85 I don’t want the music to be right in your face as a viewer right before the end.
loud enough to go hey, we’re wrapping up this video and then another keyframe slopes down to zero as everything fades out. And then we’re done. And that’s essentially how I did this. Cat. I’m not going to bore you with the captions the captions or captions. My only real thing is that I don’t love that the captions are at the bottom because I’ve found
on that on tick tock the user interface is gets in the way of these captions. So I on my next video have to figure out what to do to make this set of captions work for that particular user interface. More to come on that but this is how I made this video in Camtasia. Two minute video didn’t take me terribly long to make but you know, it certainly took me longer than two minutes. So yeah, I hope you liked it. I hope you learned something if you watched the drive thru voiceover video, and I hope you learned a little more about Camtasia and my thought process behind how I made this thanks again, see you in the next one.