How to crop a video in Camtasia | Tutorial for Absolute Beginners

Cropping a video in Camtasia is very easy, you can crop the video on the canvas or export a cropped version of your video, depending on what you need. In this short tutorial for beginners, I cover both use cases in cropping a video in Camtasia.

First I show you how you can crop a video on the canvas so that you can fit other videos in the same frame, perhaps achieve a picture-in-picture effect, by resizing or cropping a video and placing another video underneath.

I show you the way to go into Crop mode and also the shortcut to quickly crop a video directly on canvas while you're editing.

The second scenario I demonstrate is how to crop a video and export it cropped, maybe you want to import a video in Camtasia and export it at a different aspect ratio or export a vertical video for iPhone or TikTok or YouTube Shorts, etc. This way you edit your project settings, place a regular video on your canvas and then resize it or position it on the canvas to show the subject in the picture at all times.

I show also a little trick by using custom animations to make sure the subject stays on screen if it moves but your video is vertical, so we do a little bit of object tracking.

Hello in this quick tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can crop a video in Camtasia. It's very easy to crop and it depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to export the video at a specific size, maybe for Instagram or social media, or if you want to crop the video on screen so you can put it beside another clip, it's very easy to do. Let me show you.

I'm going to import a clip, on my timeline, you can see it on the timeline here. And the first thing is maybe I want to crop it so that I can only see this big picture, this big building in here. That is very easy in Camtasia, at the top bar, you can switch from the edit mode to the crop mode by clicking this, and now the outline of the clip turns blue. And now that means that when you resize it, it's not going to resize it, but it's going to crop it. For example, if I pull on the left here, it's cropping all of the other buildings and from the right, like this it's cropping this. You can see the clip is still playing and it still works, I just don't see anything around the area that I cropped. You can crop from the top as well or the bottom, and you can still move it around. The video is still going to play but now you won't see the rest of the video.

You can do this very easily also without switching to the crop mode, by staying in edit mode, and when you want to crop, you just hold down the ALT key. Hold it down and you can see the outline of the video changes to blue, which means you are in crop mode. You can see also on the top bar, you are going into crop mode just temporarily, while you're pressing the ALT key down. So hold it down, and you drag these handles and there is your video coming back so you can change the cropping.

You can resize and the cropping also can be animated. So if you want to keep a lock on this big building here, you can animate it so that when the building moves out of the screen, you can add an animation, go to Animations, Animations, Custom animation, drag the animation here, and then make it longer like this.

And then, when you're moving to the point where the animation, the end frame turns red, you can then press ALT again, to go into crop mode and remove the crop from one side and move it to the other side. So now the building is again in frame. So look what happens, the cropping is animating and tracking my building so that the building is always inside the video frame, and also you are cropping and animating it. So the cropping can be animated.

So this way you can put other images or other clips behind your clip because it is see-through. So for example, if I bring in another video clip and put it on a track behind my original clip, you can see that I can see now the other clip through it, and my clip is playing on top of it.

You can then move it anywhere you like and so on. So this is one way to crop the video on your canvas.

If you actually want to crop the video and export it cropped, of course you need to change your project settings. So let's make a new project and bring in the same video in my project, the same video with the building.

Just place it on your timeline somewhere. And now you can see my video is widescreen HD, but I want to export it for example as a phone size, which is a vertical video. All you need to do is go to the Project settings at the top, the zoom dropdown, go to Project settings and change the canvas size. You can see now it is HD.

I can drop down this menu and choose, for example, something like iPhone XS as an iPhone. You notice I click Apply, and now my video is of course out of the frame. It's not entirely in the frame because this is my screen now. So to do this, to make the video play full screen and cropped, all you need to do is just grab the video, use the handles to resize it like so, and resize it like so. And if you need to adjust it horizontally, you can still do that by dragging it left and right while making sure you're not leaving any blank bars at the top and the bottom, like this.

So again, if you want to keep the building in sight for example, let's say maybe I want to keep this building in here. Of course my video is going to play and that building is going to go out of the video. But again, you can animate this. So let's add an animation, go to Animations, Custom animation, drag it to your video and maybe move it for the entire duration back and forth like this.

And then go to the end and move your video to the very end where that building is moving. So now you can see my viewable area that I care about is inside of the phone frame at all times, like so. When you're ready, you can export your video, and because Camtasia project size has been changed to an iPhone frame, everything else you see on the outside is not going to show in your video.

The video is actually going to be vertical and it's going to have just this content in it. You can add titles and other things, as long as you stay inside of this content area, you are good to go. Thank you for watching. I hope this quick tutorial was helpful. Let me know in the comments and stay tuned for more tutorials like this.

Make sure you subscribe to my channel. Thank you. .