Camtasia Theater allows you to create an attractive and interactive Flash Menu to launch Camtasia Studio-made Flash files.
Important Notice: You must produce your movies within Camtasia Studio using the Legacy SWF output template to ensure that your Flash movies play back correctly.

Camtasia Studio Video Tutorial

How To Create a Camtasia Theater

Camtasia Theater allows you to create an attractive and interactive Flash Menu to launch Camtasia Studio-made Flash files.
Important Notice: You must produce your movies within Camtasia Studio using the Legacy SWF output template to ensure that your Flash movies play back correctly.

Accessing Camtasia Theater

There are a couple of ways to access the Camtasia Theater application.

• Choose Create web menu in the Camtasia Studio Task List.

• Or choose Tools > Camtasia Theater.

 

Creating a New Flash Menu

• In Camtasia Theater, give your Flash menu a title and determine the look by adjusting font size, menu width and alignment.
• Choose the colors for your menu.

• The two active buttons on the right side of the menu list give you the option to either add SWF movies individually, or to add all SWF movies in a folder. Use these two buttons to populate your menu list.

• By default, the displayed name is the file name. You can change the name by double-clicking it.

• Reorder your movies with the arrow buttons to adjust the order, and remove any movies you do not want to be part of your Flash menu.

When you have made all the additions and edits to the list, you are ready to customize the look of the controller.

Customizing the Controller

• Click the Controls tab to show the available options.

• Here, you can select whether or not you want the movies to pause before playing or start automatically. If you choose to pause first, you have to manually click the Start button to play the movie. You can also customize the color of the movie controller and add a short About Text that will display in the Flash menu.

• The next step is to define how the Duration/Elapsed time is displayed. A variety of formats are available for you to choose from, and you can also change the font type and color used.

• One important area I want to draw attention to is the Preload Movie Properties section.

The Preload Movie is a short clip displayed while the main movie is loaded.  The default movie looks like this:

You can choose any SWF movie you like as well as determine how long the preload movie is displayed. This flexibility allows you to display a short summary of what the movie is about, provide some background information or to display your name and contact info, all while the main movie is loading in the background.

Once all movies are added and you have finished customizing the controller you are ready to export and create the actual menu.

Exporting the Flash Menu & Saving it as a Project

How Do I Export My Flash Menu?

• To create your Flash menu, click the Export Flash Menu button.
• Select a destination folder in the Browse dialog that appears.
• Click OK. Your Flash Menu is created. When the process is completed, you will see a confirmation message and the menu will automatically be launched by default.

How Do I Save My Flash Menu as a Project?
Camtasia Theater allows you to save your Flash menu as a project. This allows you to open and edit it at a later time and makes it easy to update a Flash menu as needed. To save your Flash menu as a project, choose File>Save As and give your project a name. 

Uploading the Flash Menu to a website

When publishing a Flash menu on a website it is important to remember:

• Producing a Flash menu creates a folder containing 5 files and two additional folders.
• All the files in this folder are required for the Flash menu to function properly so make sure to upload the entire folder to your web server.
• Link to the HTML file to launch the theater.

Customizing the Flash Menu’s Borders

By default, the border around Flash Menu looks like this:

There is a way to change the look of the border. Browse to the folder that contains your produced Flash Menu and open the images subfolder.

The images folder contains the graphics that make up the border of a theater.

You can change these graphics in any image editing program, or create new images from scratch that follow the same dimensions. Replace the old images with the new images. In this case, I simply darkened the existing images.

As a result, the new Flash Menu looks like this:
If you create a set of border images you would like to use as your default for all Flash menus, browse to your Camtasia Studio directory (usually C:\Program Files\TechSmith\Camtasia Studio 4) and choose Resources > html_output.

The images folder in the html_output folder contains the graphics used by Camtasia Theater for all borders. Changing the images in this folder will affect the border of all Flash menus created with Camtasia Theater.
We highly recommend creating a back-up copy of the original images folder in case you want to use the original border at some point in the future.