CamTasia tip – increasing the call-out length

I’ve just spent 15 minutes trying to figure out an odd behaviour in CamTasia v5.1.0.  The documentation (great video demo) explains that a call-out can be added, and then by dragging the call-out we can change the length for its display.

Only…it seemed that you couldn’t drag the length.  You can easily drag its position, but why not the length?

After some frustrated hacking around, I saw a solution (in the darned-awful UI!) at experts-exchange for Camtasia: How to Extend the Duration of a Custom Callout in the Timeline.  As wize-owl says:

“The timeline has a zoom feature to change the viewing resolution.  It is adjustable by the plus (+) and minus (-) symbols.  Click the + zoom a couple times.  This will expand the timeline and the callout, and give you a larger area by which to grab the edges.  Now you can expand the callout to cover a larger area of the timeline.”

I had to zoom in 8 times to see the +/- symbols, I’ve since reset the default time-length for call-outs from 3 seconds up to 8 seconds and the +/- symbols are more visible.

If you follow the above experts-exchange link, you might find that they’ve shielded the solution from you until you login (that darn awful UI of theirs…).  If so, either goolge for “camtasia length call-out experts-exchange” and click the cache’s link, or try this cached link.

Want to learn more about screencasting? Take a look at my screencasting blog which has a screencast tutorial category, this includes entries on how to convert CamTasia 6 mp4s into flv videos and discusses the rate of adoption of the new mp4 standard, amongst stories of how to decrease your bounce-rate and increase sales with screencasts.

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Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.

18 Comments

  • robert
    Thank you so much for this tip! It was driving me crazy too!
  • THANK YOU! I was going nuts trying to figure this out!!
  • Julia
    Here, here! How insane to just have this in the UI and NOT in the properties. I had to do about 3-4 Google searches until I found a link to you. I heartily THANK YOU.
  • Thanks very much for this, I had been trying to figure out what I was doing wrong for ages.
  • Thanks for pointing this out Ian, and thanks for quoting the solution so I didn't have to use that awful experts-exchange site :-) You just saved me a whole lot of frustration...
  • Arlene
    Thank you so much!! Such a simple solution for something I spent WAY too long trying to figure out on my own.
  • Thanks, I really needed that. Crazy UI.
  • Chelle
    Thank you! You just saved me a lot of time and frustration when I'm already frazzled over a deadline! =)
  • Brandon
    Thanks a lot. It only took one Google search, but when I clicked on this link it helped me out a lot. =)
  • Thangu
    Thanks a lot.This helped a lot.
  • joan
    Genius! Thanks!
  • Evelyne
    i was getting frustrated, spent a whole 40 minutes trying to figure out how to adjust the length, thanks a lot
  • A simple solution that came in very handy. Thanks for the information.
  • Myles
    Thanks, you'd think for a version 5/6 that this woudl not happen. Very painful exp. Thanks !! I'm not going to upgrade this software, using pinnacle v12 now.
  • Annamaynoon
    Thanks to you! And thanks to Google too!
  • Karen
    Ian..thank you so, so much...I thought maybe my trial version had less features..Dr. K Genius
  • Simply good! I might be finding to adjust the length of a callout throughout of my life, if I did not come to this page. Simple zoom function, OMG! after reading this page, I am feeling how dumb I can be. Thanks for posting. regards
  • Thank you sir... very much!