When I got today’s e-mail announcement of Camtasia Studio 8.1, I was super-excited. You see, one of the new features is Remove Colour, which is also known as green-screening (although you can use other colours if you want). This is great for people who want to splice video with other video, like dropping in another background or placing your video on top of your screenshots. Getting an evenly-lit, well-coloured background can be a challenge when doing green-screening…

… but if you’re drawing digitally, it’s a piece of cake. =) And it lets you do cool stuff! See below:

In the past, I’ve done a few short animations using digital sketches. To keep things on track without running out of space, I pre-draw my sketches, then trace over them. I used Artrage Studio Pro for this because it allowed you to record and replay drawing strokes, so I could draw everything, start recording, and then redraw the image. I like Autodesk Sketchbook Pro much better, though. I’d been thinking about buying a separate video editing program to handle greenscreening, but having it built into Camtasia Studio is even better.

Here’s how I did this video:

1. I drew an image using a color I knew I wasn’t going to be using in the final image. For fun, I used non-photo blue (rgb: 164, 221, 237), which is one of the colours that artists use when sketching on paper because it practically disappears when the drawing is scanned in grayscale.
2. I started the Camtasia recording and drew over my image using a different color.
3. I edited the Camtasia recording, splitting the tracks and turning on Remove Color for some parts. I also added some text callouts.

Tada!

You can find the Remove Color option under Visual Properties (select More > Visual Properties if you don’t see it). Enjoy!