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How Can I Add Shapes, Arrows, and Text to a Video With Amped Replay?

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Dear friends, welcome back! After covering ways to import and enhance video in the previous posts of this series (click here to see the list!), today we’re entering the next step: presentation! We’ll start from the basic thing: adding shapes, arrows, and text to your video. Be ready, the flexibility and power of Amped Replay will blow your mind!

In Amped Replay, click on the Annotate tab, choose Shape, Arrow, or Text and just draw. Then customize the aspect from the right panel, and right-click on the object to quickly set how long it should stay.

“A picture’s worth a thousand words” is one of my favorite sayings (followed by “a picture’s worth a thousand lyes” – if curious, check Amped Authenticate features page). Sometimes, however, images alone are not enough. You may need to add a text that calls for some action (e.g. “CALL THE POLICE!”), or perhaps add a circle to mark who’s the suspect in a group of persons. Let’s use a sample case to guide the rest of this post.

We’ve been asked to send out quickly to the media a picture of this suspect so that it can go on pubs TVs and on everyone’s smartphone.

After using some of the Enhance tools we’ve been presenting in the last weeks, we can get something like this:

And now, let’s make things easier for the general public! For example, we’d like to:

  • Highlight that the subject is wearing a blue jacket, a gray beanie, and “aviator” style sunglasses. We can’t be sure the image will be display on good monitors (we can almost be sure of the opposite, actually) so making some details more explicit may help;
  • Recommend people to call the police emergency line if they spot the suspect.

Let’s start by activating the Annotate tab, selecting the Text tool, and drawing a box close to the jacket. Once drawn, we can enter text and then adjust its look-and-feel from the many options in the right panel.

As you can see, we’re not forced to stay “within the image”. Replay allows you to position annotation objects outside, and the canvas gets automatically extended. You’ll be free to choose whether you want such extensions to be present in the exported final video or not (it’s an option under the Annotate’s Options button).

Ok, next we’re gonna add an arrow that connects the “Blue jacket” text to the actual jacket. This is as easy as clicking on the Arrow tool, drawing the arrow, and adjusting the width.

We can repeat this both for the beanie and the glasses. Amped Replay offers a handy copy-paste option that will save us lots of time.

Now there’s an important point of Amped Replay annotations that we need to cover: their persistence. By default, all annotations are applied only to the frame where you create them. If you want an annotation object to remain for the whole video, just right-click on it and choose “Set for All Frames”.

You’ll see that the player bar at the bottom updates to show you that there’s an annotation object that extends to the whole video.

Of course, you can also limit the persistence of an annotation to just a range of frames. Move to the start frame, right-click on the annotation, and choose Set From This Frame. Then move to the final frame, right-click and choose Set Until This Frame.

Before we say goodbye, let’s take a look at the Shape tool. It allows you to draw circles, ellipses, rectangles, and squares over the image. It’s also very intuitive to use: activate it, choose the shape between Rectangle and Ellipse, and draw over the frame. If you choose Ellipse and then hold the shift button as you draw, you’ll get a circle. The same goes with Rectangle: holding the shift will give you a square.

That’s it for today, but there’s so much more to tell about Amped Replay’s annotations! In the next blog posts, we’ll see how you can magnify or redact a region, how you can add an image or logo, how you can create a spotlight effect, and, most importantly, how you can track annotations so that they follow an object of interest.

That’s all for today! We hope you’ve found this issue of the “Amped Replay Tutorials: How do I do this?” series interesting and useful! Stay tuned and don’t miss the next ones. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook: we’ll post a link to every new tutorial so you won’t miss any!

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