After five years here on YouTube and more than 250 videos later, one of the most common questions I receive is, "Scott, how do you get that yellow highlight around your cursor?"
Well, in today's video, I'm going to show you how I do it and how I use Camtasia to produce my videos.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
This particular question about how I apply this yellow highlight is usually followed by comments such as, "It makes watching your videos so much easier, Scott. I love that I can always follow your cursor, know what you're doing," and especially if I'm doing other things, such as maybe zooming in on particular content and zooming out.
This is especially helpful if I'm highlighting certain fields or maybe a dropdown menu in one of the software that I'm covering.
So, in order to do this, I use a software called Camtasia.
Now, for some of you, this may be brand new and you have not heard of Camtasia. For others, you may associate Camtasia exclusively with training and producing training videos.
But I actually use Camtasia for almost all of my video content right here on the Simpletivity channel, both for screen recording and for editing that content afterward.
Recording
So let's get started right here within the Camtasia interface.
Now, at first glance, this may look a little intimidating. There's an awful lot of options that are available to you here within Camtasia. However, compared to many more expensive and more complicated software, I find that Camtasia boils it down to its essentials. And I especially like their menu layout, the choice of words, and the design that they've used so that even a novice—even someone with very limited skills when it comes to video editing—can produce polished and professional content.
But let's get started with the recording process.
Here in the top left-hand corner, we've got this big red recording button, and if I select this, what it's going to do is give me this recording console down below. Now, I can make a few different choices here if I want to record my entire screen or maybe I just want to record a certain section of my screen. I can also choose if I want to record my webcam. And sometimes you may see that I'll have my image in the top left-hand corner as a part of some of my videos. Lastly, you can choose the microphone that you need and adjust your levels. But other than that, you're pretty much ready to go right out of the gate.
So if I hit this record button, it's going to give me a brief countdown: 3, 2, 1, and now everything that I'm doing here, as I navigate, as I go from website to website, whatever I do on my computer screen, it is going to be recorded. Now, none of those effects are going to appear while you're recording; we're going to have to apply those afterward.
But let's just go through here for a second. Maybe I scroll down here, maybe I want to open up this note. I'm going to do something here, I'm going to show you something, and then I'm going to close it down.
When I'm all done, all I need to do is open up this recording console, and I can either pause if I want to go to the next step in my recording, maybe I wasn't happy with this recording, so I can delete it and try again. But if I am pleased with it, all I need to do is hit stop, and that's going to bring me right back here to Camtasia. And here it has actually added it to my media bin. So now I can drag it onto my timeline down below, I can start cutting out parts that I don't want and start to build it in with everything else in my video workflow.
So let me take something that we recorded earlier, and I'm going to drag it down onto the timeline.
Now here you can piece together a large number of files, whether it's a collection of videos or you can also import pictures and images if you want to include them in your files as well.
One of the first things that I like to do is yes, add that little highlight, and I also like to add a bit of an accent to my cursor so that you know when I have clicked on something.
So let's go ahead and do that. Here within Camtasia, I'm going to click on this little more option here, and we see an option here for cursor effects. The first one we see here is this cursor highlight.
So if I apply this, all I need to do is click and drag it onto the image or the part of my video file that I would like to add it to, because maybe I don't want to add it to the entire video. Maybe I just want to add it to a portion.
Here in the middle of the screen in the preview pane, you can see that that yellow highlight has been added. So as I go around, as I preview and drag through this video, you can see that we now have this yellow cursor highlight.
But let's go to the left click here, and you can see that there's some other options that we can add. So, for example, maybe I want a little red highlight to happen whenever I click the cursor, or maybe I want this little crosshairs, this little scope when it happens.
In some of my earlier videos, I used to use this little ripple effect, but I found that it was a little too distracting to have that much water ripple happening on screen. So what I settled on was this one called left click warp.
And just like we did with the cursor highlight, we can just click and drag it onto the part of the video where we want to add it. So the next time that I click something here, let's see when I go to open up—let me drag this over a little bit.
Just before I open this up, you will see, there we go. There's that little indentation so you knew that I clicked on that particular icon.
Last but not least, the other effect that I use most frequently is the ability to zoom in.
So for here, I'm going to click on animations, and this I find is most effective, especially in my tutorials, when I may be showing you something that is only a fraction of the screen, but I want to make sure that you know which checkbox or dropdown or what I'm doing in that given moment.
So here, what I can do—we have sort of two preview panes on the right-hand side or the main preview pane. This is what you're getting to see or what viewers are going to see within your video.
But on the left-hand side, all I need to do is actually drag the little box here to see what do I want to zoom in on. So now you can see this is what it's going to look like when the video is finished.
I can zoom in for this period of time, and then after, when I'm done, let's say I've gone in here and I've hit close, all I need to do is hit this button, which is called scaled to fit.
And so if I go back, let me just preview that for you for a second. So I'm just going to pull it back a few seconds before I zoom in. I'm going to hit play so I can actually preview the video. There it's going to zoom in, it's going to show you what's going on, and then a few seconds later, when I tell it to, it's going to zoom back out.
Adding Text
But of course, Camtasia is so much more than just mouse effects. And one of the things that I use Camtasia for frequently is adding text to my videos.
So here under Annotations, all I need to do is choose one of these pre-set layouts, which are all customizable. I can change the color and just need to drag it onto the video where I want it to be placed.
So here I can come in and give it the new video title. Something really exciting like that. I can change the size of it, I can change the font, and I can add some additional effects to this as well so it whooshes into the screen or maybe it fades in at a particular time.
The other thing that I use quite frequently within Camtasia is also the ability to spotlight different areas of the video.
So if I want to highlight a certain area, however, without zooming in, I can use the spotlight feature, and sometimes I also use this one which is pixelate. So let’s say that I’ve got something here—let me drag this out of the way for a second.
Let’s see, I’ve got something personal here, such as my personal email address or email account. I can drag this onto the screen and cover it over a certain section that I don’t exactly want you to see all of those details.
On the right-hand side, you can make further adjustments. So maybe that’s too extreme; that almost looks like I’ve blanked it out with a white square or something like that. But I can bring this down, so you still can’t read it but it is blocking out that information.
So a large number of effects and things that you can add to really polish up your video.
Now, if Camtasia is too pricey for your needs and for your business, I would encourage you to check out my video on Chrome extensions. Included in it, I share with you a free alternative for recording your screen.
Thank you so much for watching and remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.
