Hello, fellow Camtasia users Alex mitts here with a quick Camtasia tip.
As you start to use Camtasia, more and more, you’ll find that you start to do things over and over and over again. And you’ll also find that you have to start adjusting things over and over and over again, which can be inconvenient and time-consuming.
For this particular clip, I’m going to just choose this free stock footage here of a lady’s hands typing on a keyboard. And one thing that I do quite often is fade between things. And it’s I use it so much that I’ve actually made it a favorite in my favorites panel. And generally, all I do is I drop this down onto the clip, and it will fade in. And as we reach the end of the clip, it will fade out. Now there are some I mean, this is a nice looking slow, gradual fade. However, there are times when I have to fade between things rather quickly. I still like the fade-in in certain instances that don’t call for a hard cut.
For example, I’ll shorten up this clip to save us both some time, I might take this fade which defaults to one second in one second out. And you can see that as you select one of these fades. Down at the bottom, I see 01 semi-colon 00. That’s one-second zero frames. And I often find myself having to drag these down to a certain number of frames. So maybe you know 30 frames in a second, I’ll drag this down to 15 or 10. So either a third of a second or half a second.
Let’s go with 10 frames, quick fade-in, and quick fade-out. And if you do that over and over again, those adjustments can cost you a lot of time I’m gonna hit Ctrl Z twice to undo that, you can save yourself a little bit of time by selecting one fade, and then Ctrl-clicking the other fade to select them both and you can adjust them both at the same time. However, I find that in a project, I will keep my fades consistent, I don’t often vary the length of transitions.
If it’s going to be 10 frames for one clip, it’s probably going to be 10 frames for all clips. So what I’ll do is I’ll get rid of these, I’ll select, delete, select, delete, in Edit under preferences, or you can press Ctrl comma. On your second tap here where it says timing, you can adjust the length of your transitions by default along with a bunch of other things as well.
If you find that your animations are not the right length, if your annotations are not the right length, if your captions, images, etc, are not the right length, you can adjust all that stuff here. So before as I was dropping transitions in, they will default to one second. If I want them to be 10 frames, which is a third of a second, I’ll maybe adjust just to 0.3. Hit OK. And now the next time I drag in my fade it’s going to be nice and short. No need to adjust. Do a quick test to make sure it’s okay and move right along with the rest of my project.
These default settings can be changed at any time so don’t feel that you have to be married to one-time setting. Go back in and adjust as many times as you like in the midst of any project and you will save yourself a ton of time