Camtasia Studio Learning Center

Camtasia Studio 6 Tutorial:

Produce a Selection of Your Timeline: A Very Handy Thing to Know

Why would you want to produce a selection (a portion) of your Timeline? Did you even know you could?

Producing your video—especially a long one, is quite a time investment. Knowing how to produce a selection of your Timeline will save you a lot of time. Specifically, there are at least five reasons why Camtasia Studio users like to produce a selection of their Timeline instead of just producing the whole video.

• Produce a selection to see exactly how certain effects—like transitions, quizzes, hotspots, captions, clip speed and more will look. The Preview Window is a good approximation of how your finished video will look, but there’s nothing like true production.
• If you’re trying to tweak production settings and curious about how the changes will impact quality and file size, you can produce a selection you consider “typical” of your video. Example produce 1 minute of a 20 minute video and multiple the file size by 20 to get a decent guess about what the total file size would be.
• Produce a selection of the video (in AVI format) so you can use it in another part of your video or another video entirely. For example, you have an intro you really like—you can produce that intro as a separate file you can use in other projects.
• You can produce a selection between markers to use as a “chapter”. For example you can produce selections from one or more videos to incorporate into a Theater presentation.
• Produce a selection of audio as an MP3 file.

How to Produce a Selection on the Timeline

1. Click and drag the playhead to select desired portion of Timeline. In this example I want to produce the end of my video to see the transition and test the Flash hotspot callout I added.

2. Right click the TOP of the timeline where the timestamps are and click Produce Selection As… The Production Wizard appears.

3. Produce your video however you wish. Using the Production Wizard to produce a selection of the Timeline is no different than producing the entire video. (Except of course it doesn't produce the whole video--all the features of the Production Wizard are still available.)