A simple screen call out / highlight

Forum Index » PowerDirector (previous versions)

bboursaw73

Newbie Joined: Dec 03, 2015 15:00 Messages: 6 Offline

Solved by

Jul 11, 2019 18:28

Hello,

I have been on the search for some time now to figure out how I can do what should be incredibly simple in the world of video editing. I just want to highlight (I am trying to avoid the word spotlight, as that seems to bring up motion tracking, which I'm not really trying to do - I don't think) a specific area on the screen and shade out 'screen' the rest of it. I am sure I'm getting the terminology wrong here, so I do apologize. I create training videos and am trying to highlight a specific are of my recorded video. Let's say I want to call out a specific window of an application in my video. I've seen this in several other video applications such as Camtasia, which they refer to as a spotlight annotation. You can see this in action in this youtube video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbBprdlSNCA

Can PD really not do this?

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Jul 11, 2019 19:55

There are many ways to hightlight various subjects in PD.

There are animated PiPs that can be downloaded from DirectorZone that will draw a circle or box around an item. There are also both included and 3rd party FX that will give you a spotlight and/or blur out and/or desaturate your background.

You can also use a mask on one copy of your clip that's overlaid on another copy that's got reduced opacity, and there's even a tutorial creation pack that has all kinds of active arrows and other attention-grabbing animations:

That comes free with the subscription version of PD17, or it can be purchased separately.

I don't know which PD version you have, but if you look in the FX room you should see at least one spotlight effect along with a color focus and normal focus effect. You can also search for PD tutorials here and on YouTube to see how other people have done this.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°