New in Camtasia 2020 are magnetic tracks. After watching this movie you will be able to speed up your editing by using the new magnetic tracks feature.

Original Script

Now let’s handle the two mistakes in the middle of our movie.

To help you see where the edit points are, I added some clip markers to this project. So see the marker labels, click the small chevron here to reveal the markers.

Even without the markers, mistakes are pretty easy to see by looking for gaps in the audio waveform. There’s one here, and the other one is here. In the last chapter of this course watch the movie on handling mistakes to learn more about this recording technique which makes editing your footage really easy.

Zoom into the clip with Command Shift = or Control Shift = a few times and lets to the Edit 1 Marker. Then press your spacebar to preview this section of the clip.

PLAY.

The mistake is right here at the end of this phrase, then there is a silent gap, and then a rephrase which goes back to the beginning of this whole complete thought. This rephrase technique makes this a really easy edit to make.

Place your playhead right in front of the new good rephrased audio. Remember, we can only make a trim edit at the end of a clip, so with your playhead right here, Split the clip by clicking the Split icon, or use the keyboard shortcut Command T on Mac or S on Windows. Your single clip is now two clips.

Select the incoming clip, move your mouse over the end to get the double headed arrow and begin trimming the clip back. You would then trim back to the matching audio which is back at the Edit 1 marker. However, if you look at your timeline you can see that you’re creating a gap in your project, that we would have to close by dragging the downstream clip up to snap in place. Not bad, but here’s a cool trick. Let’s undo this edit by pressing command or control z a couple times, and then turn on a new feature in Camtasia 2020, the Magnetic Track, by clicking this magnet icon here at the head of the track. A magnetic track will automatically close any gaps during an edit for any clips on the single track that it’s enabled for. This is a great feature for single track editing.

Now, let’s make that same trim edit. Drag the end of the outgoing clip back to just before the start of the phrase, here around Edit 1. This time the downstream clip automatically follows the trim and closes the gap for you. Back your playhead up a bit, and let’s preview your edit.

That sounds great.

Ok let’s take care of this other mistake, scrub your timeline down to the Edit 2 marker. Play through this whole section on your own to hear what it sounds like and, pay attention to the action on the canvas as you listen to the dialog.

The mistake happens just before the gap, and rephrase goes back to the last complete thought which starts at Edit 2. But as you scrub over this region you can see that there are mouse movements during the original dialog, but not during the rephrase. Find the point in the clip where the mouse movements end, which looks like about right here. From here to the mistake is where you would want to make your edit.

It looks like there is a natural gap in the dialog here, so let’s place our place head right there, and make our Split with Command T or the S key. Now, select the downstream clip and start making your trim edit. Find the matching phrase, and trim to right about here where the Cut back in marker is at. Remember, trim edits are non-destructive, so you can make fine tuned adjustments if you need to. So don’t worry about getting your edit perfect on the first try.

Back your playhead up and let’s preview the edit.

That Looks and sounds great. You preserved the action on screen, and improved the clarity of dialog with a single edit.

Whenever you complete the editing of a movie, watch the whole movie all the way through, to make sure you’re happy with all of your edits. In the next movie, we’ll share this movie with the client.