If you own Camtasia studio 2020 or later, then you might have tried and used the many premade motion graphics templates that comes with the software. If you haven’t tried them out, it’s now high to do so. You can find the templates by clicking on ‘Library‘ on your Camtasia studio editor.
In this blogpost tutorial, I will share three ways that you can customize Camtasia studio motion graphics templates.
Basic Customization
Basic customization includes making changes like the template’s text and color. To achieve this; first, click to the folder containing the template you want to customize to open.
Next, click the template of your choice and drag it to the Camtasia studio timeline.
From here, you can change the text, font and color of both text and background. To do this, click the ‘plus’ (+) button on top of the template you selected.
Then choose the item you want to change. For instance, When I pick one item it will display in the preview window. From here, I can make changes on the ‘properties‘ section to suite my needs. This includes changing things color, theme, outline thickness, font type and more.
Follow the same procedure to format the text. First, click on the text title from the template group on your timeline. Then from the display window, double click to activate the text and start typing in the new text you want to see appear on the video.
Once done click on the minus (-) button to close the group.
Change Template’s Duration
Another thing that one may want to customize is the templates duration. For instance, you may want the template to be 5 seconds and the original template is 12 seconds. How can you reduce this time while retaining the animations inside the template?
The first option will be rendering the template after completing your basic customization. When rendered, import the file into your media bin as .mp4 file then to timeline.
When you right click on the imported video on your timeline, you can add ‘clip speed’ to it. Adding ‘clip speed‘ enables you to enter custom duration from the ‘Properties‘ tab.
This procedure works well for someone who is not tech savvy. Sadly, it’s a lot of work if you are overlaying the motion graphics template to a project on your timeline. Exporting the template will require that you open a new project, then cut the modified template and paste on the new clean timeline. From here, export it individually.
This takes to another alternative option.
The best way you can customize the motion graphics template to match the duration of your choice is is doing it directly on the timeline of you main project.
Open the template on the timeline using the plus(+) button. Right click on each item one by one and add clip speed. Enter the duration you want from the properties tab.
Once done, close the template then click and drag from the right to trim and to suite it to your timeline.
Creative customization
With Camtasia studio, you can creatively customize the motion graphics template beyond the original authors concept.
After making changes to the template i.e color and text. You can creatively move/crop/remove items on the template. For example, if it has a motion video on as the background, you can remove it and overlay it to your video or image.
Finally, another way would be to creatively blend the motion background with the image by reducing the motion video opacity to 50%. This works well with images.
Once you have mastered these three ways, you can do a lot on an existing Camtasia studio motion graphics template.
That’s it from me.
If this tutorial was helpful, let me know in the comments section below.
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Until next, bye and take care.
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