Play video inside phone or Custom Device Frame in Camtasia 2021 | Media Matte and Masking

This is how you can play a video inside a mobile phone frame in Camtasia - use any image from the internet of a phone or device frame, to mask it and show a video playing inside it, using a feature that was added in Camtasia 2021: Media Matte. 

You can choose any device, not just a phone, provided it's static and upright, so that you can easily cut out the screen and replace it with your video. You can then play any video inside this frame by applying a couple effects that are easy to work with in Camtasia 2021.

This very short Camtasia tutorial only shows this procedure. Let me know if you like these quick and dirty tutorials and I will make more.

Okay. So this is a way to add a device frame that you don't download through the Camtasia assets library. You just find an image online and you can see this iPhone here, it doesn't have transparency. It's got a black screen here and it's just as easy to mask it and use it for putting videos inside of the frame.

So let me show you how it is. I downloaded this PNG file. I'm going to import this to Camtasia. So right here, I'm just dragging it to my media library and now I can put it on my canvas right there. By default Camtasia is going to change the canvas size. If you don't have anything else to match the media, you're dragging there, but I don't want that.

So I'm going to go back to Project settings, and change it to HD like this. So you can see that this actual PNG does have alpha around the phone, but not on the screen. So let me bring in another video file that I can, I want to put a video inside of the frame. So I'm going to go here and I've got a few videos here, so let me just bring this one in here.

Okay. And I'm going to put this on the timeline. And I'm going to put it below the phone frame like this. So as you can see now, the video is playing, but of course you can't see it through. So very easy to make this work. You can actually go to the Annotations, go to the Shapes, find a rectangular one and just put it inside of the frame like this, resize it to match the frame.

And the following effect only works in Camtasia 2021, by the way. You go to your Visual effects here and use media matte and drag it to this shape that we just added right now. Let me expand the shape to fit the full length and then go from Alpha, go to Alpha invert. This is actually going to mask out the inside of the frame.

You want to copy this group together, not copy it, sorry, you, you select both of them and group them. And now look, you can see your video file is see-through. Now of course you can make that also disappear by creating another media matte. So let's move the phone layer higher. And on this new layer, I go back to Annotation, I create another one, another rectangle like this. Also make that the full length and this time, just resize this one to be just slightly outside of the frame, like, so, and then apply the media matte to it using visual effects, media matte and there you go. Your video is masked inside of this. You can also select both of them and group them.

So now you've got a phone frame. Video file playing inside of that. If you want to actually, pan around you just open this group here and you can move around your video file like this, and you can add an animation if you want to like, so, you know, and you can move the video, inside it using an animation to focus on whatever area of the screen you like.

And then that's going to pan around and the video is going to move. So this is how you do it. Two media matte effects on two shapes. And then of course, if you want to select both of them now and group them, they become, everything becomes a single object that you can move around. And you can paste it. You create another one here.

Two phones. All you have to do is just go inside and replace the media, the video file. So there you go.

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