Understanding annotations

- [Narrator] Now that you have a strong foundation in the basics of recording and editing, in the next several chapters we're gonna focus on ways to enhance and refine your screencasts. Let's begin with annotations. Annotations are a combination of text and graphic overlays that can be extremely effective at drawing your viewers eye to exactly what you want them to focus on. When you click on annotations, there are six tabs with several examples of each type of annotation. In the first three tabs, annotations are grouped by similar looking styles.

When you select a style in one tab, Camtasia will automatically select that same style in the other tabs, allowing you to create a consistent look and feel within your movie. All annotations work in a similar way. You select the annotation that you want to add and then drag it onto your canvas and it's instantly converted to a movie clip in your timeline on the next available track and it begins wherever your playhead is currently located.

You can then use the onscreen control handles to adjust the position, scale, and rotation of the object. You can make further refinements to the object inside of the properties inspector. Depending on what type of object that you select, the properties inspector will show you all of the available options that you can customize for that type of object. In the next movie, we'll explore all six of the major types of annotations in an effort to better understand why you may want to choose one type of annotation over another.