Tutorial: Producing Screencams on Mobile Devices with TechSmith Camtasia
If you have Camtasia for Mac 2.9 or later, a Mac running OS 10.10 or later, and an iOS device running 8.0 and later with a Lighting connector, you can record screencams of operations on your iOS device. This tutorial will show you how.
Annotation
In the upper left of the Camtasia editor interface, click Gesture FX to reveal these effects (Figure 6, below). Note that there are five effects; double tap, swipe, tap and hold, pinch, and tap. In the Teradek project, I used only one: tap.
Figure 6. Dragging the effect into the preview window. Click the image to see it at full size.
In the timeline, drag the playhead to the target location for the effect, which is typically when you touched the device during the demonstration.
Drag the effect into the preview window over the spot where you touched the screen.
Note that the Camtasia editor inserts the effect into the timeline so that it straddles the playhead; it doesn’t start the effect at the playhead, which I would have preferred. So you may have to click and drag the effect to make appear at the right time.
If you can’t see the effect in the timeline, hover your pointer over the bottom of the video track until the edge turns white (Figure 7, below, on the left), and then click the edge, which will open the effects bar (Figure 7, on the right). Then click the effect in the middle to drag it to the target location, or click the grab bars at the edge to adjust duration.
Figure 7. Click the white edge to reveal the effects bar.
With the double-tap, tap and hold, and tap effects, there is no configuration on-screen; you just have to customize the duration (Figure 8, below). With the swipe and pinch effects, Camtasia will display a start and stop locations. Drag those into the desired locations.
Figure 8. You can customize the start and stopping location of a swipe and pinch.
Render and produce as normal. Note that for virtually all projects that I produce, I capture with Camtasia, output a QuickTime file using the Apple Animation codec from Camtasia, and edit in Premiere Pro. With touchscreen-based projects, however, the gestures are so important that I added them in Camtasia first, then created my mezzanine file to finish up in Premiere Pro.
Kudos to TechSmith for making this process so simple and well features; the gestures are a great touch.