Animations In-Depth

This tutorial offers a deep dive into creating animations, working with visual properties, easing and more.

Visual Properties

To understand how animations work, we have to start with visual properties. An object’s visual properties are made up of position, rotation, scale and opacity.

In Camtasia, all of these are adjusted with pixel-perfect accuracy in the Properties panel, under the visual properties tab.

Animations

An animation is a change from one set of visual properties to another – a bridge from a beginning to an end. In Camtasia, animations appear as arrows directly on top of a clip.

When you first add an animation, it won’t appear to have changed anything and that’s because it’s transitioning between two identical sets of visual properties.

Animating Visual Properties

To animate an object’s visual properties, select the media and put the playhead to the right side of the animation to change the visual properties of the end state. And likewise, put the playhead anywhere on the left side to change the animation’s beginning state.

The length of the animation arrow determines how long the change will take, or the speed of the animation.

Easing

As an object animates, the look and feel of its motion is called “easing.” In Camtasia, there are five options and each one is good for different things. The default setting is “Auto.”