Customize Your Video Layout 🎨

Custom Layouts lets you remix Tella's layout templates and make them your own.

You can then reuse them across all of your videos.

With Custom Layouts, you can be more creative and make videos that look uniquely yours.

Let me show you how this works.

So let's start with the basics.

How do I make a custom layout?

So I've got a typical Tella side by side layout.

And if I want to make a custom layout, I can just click on one of the layers or both of the layers and then just move that or resize it to where I want.

When I do this, I'm prompted to save this new arrangement, this new layout, as a custom layout.

But I'm not quite ready to save this as a layout.

I'm going to keep working on this until I've got it looking and feeling how I'd like it.

So let's just put this up in the middle of the, screen here and then kind of make this a bit bigger.

and then we can center that.

Nice.

Cool.

So now I can save this and I'll call this something like Phone camera left and then hit save.

and you can see I've already got one called Phone camera.

Right.

And that looks similar, but it has my camera in this sort of phone style on the right.

And then here's the new one we've created.

And so I can now reuse this across all of my videos that have a screen and camera in them.

These layouts work just like the regular layouts work when you are trying to add multiple layouts throughout your video.

So if we start with this, one again and then we head down to the timeline and then just click and drag to add a new layout.

You can see that it will add, a section on the timeline here.

And it has selected the last layout I used for this, which was the middle camera bubble custom layout.

But let's pick the layout that we just added.

And now you can see that we've added this to the timeline.

So it transitions from this standard layout as the base layout into the new custom layout we made and then transitions out of that.

Nice.

If we head down to custom, we can click and drag to reorder the layouts.

So if you have a bunch of these or you have layouts that are related to one another.

So for example these two ones here, it's nice to keep them close together.

And then you can put, put your most popular ones or, your least favorite ones either at the top or the bottom.

If you click on the three dots here, you can rename and delete the layouts.

So if you don't want one or you've just kind of tried that for, a period of time, you can hit delete and get rid of that.

If you want to rename it, do the same thing.

You'll just be able to type in the name here.

So that is the basics of how you create, edit, update, manage custom layouts.

Custom layouts also work great with our screen cropping tool.

So here you can see I've got phone camera left the layout, the custom layout that we made earlier.

If I head over to the screen cropping tool and change the aspect ratio to say four by three and we'll crop this, you can see that the layout still preserves the sort of original idea and kind of relationship between the screen and, and the camera.

if we go and crop this again to 16 by 9, that also retains the sort of core idea that we had when we originally made this.

So you can create a custom layout based on an initial aspect ratio.

And then if you record new videos that have screen recordings with a different aspect ratio or you crop it to a different aspect ratio, the intention that you had with your original custom layout will still be preserved.

And so you don't have to make different layouts for different aspect ratios if you don't want to.

You can still use the same custom layout, across all those screen recordings, no matter what their aspect ratio is.

One of our most popular layouts features is the Apply to All tool, which lets you take the layout that you have on one clip and then apply it to all the other clips in your video.

This feature also, works great with custom layouts.

So I've got this custom layout here on my first clip, which has this sort of funky full screen camera in the background screen in the foreground thing going on.

But I've got these two different layouts in these two other clips.

And so if I want this camera backdrop to be used across the other two, I can then head up here and click Apply to all clips.

And it'll save me having to apply that custom layout to those other clips manually.

And so this is quite a simple operation with only three clips.

But if you have a lot of clips in your video, it saves a lot of time.

If you need to then make exceptions where most of your clips use a certain layout or a certain custom layout, but then a few don't, you can then override the ones that don't like we can here.

So let's say on this one actually we want to use the 5050 layout that we've made.

We can just update that here.

And then the other two can use the camera, backdrop one that we added a moment.

Alright, so to wrap this video up, I'm going to show you a couple of creative ideas for how you can actually make your own custom layouts and some of the fun things you can do with it.

So I think this is a really good example of something you can make that's maybe a little bit tricky to figure out on the surface.

So I'll show you how I do it and then you can start playing around with some of those ideas.

To start with this, we're gonna go up to this layout here and we're gonna use this as the sort of template that we're modifying.

And so the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to right click on the camera layer and we're gonna go send to back.

And so now that's in the background and the screen's in the foreground.

And then we're just gonna like shrink this down quite a bit.

And then what we're gonna do is we're just gonna make the camera layer here just way, way, way bigger.

And I'm just going to push it off screen here a little bit and then we're just going to like blow this up so that I sort of fit just in the side there.

And then we're going to put our screen here and then fill up the rest of the space.

And then that is going to be our new kind of camera backdrop one.

So I'll call that Camera backdrop two.

I could have done this as a different version where maybe it goes over here and then we move this one over there.

actually that's probably a better example because I already have one where I'm on the right side.

and that brings me to a feature I didn't actually show earlier in the video is that you can update your custom layout.

So when you modify a custom layout you don't need to make a completely new one if you don't want to.

You obviously can.

I could save this as a new one or I could just hit update and that will update that one that we just made.

Camera backdrop two.

And so now this has the sort of left aligned camera.

and then camera backdrop here has the right aligned camera and that works quite nice.

So this 50, 51, where it's sort of like this split screen with me on the left and my screen on the right, and it, kind of fully takes up the screen, is another fun, creative example.

Let's look at how to make this.

So for this layout we're going to start with the TV show style layout instead of making a layout with the camera on the left, I will do one with the camera on the right this time.

So I'm picking this one as the starting point.

I'll just get the screen out of the way for a moment.

Just going to move the camera layer over to here where it's sort of roughly taken up half of the screen and I'm still relatively centered there.

if you need to you can use the camera framing tool to kind of adjust this to get that nicely as well.

But back to our custom layout then I need the screen to kind of fill up all of the space.

But it's a bit tricky because this is not really going to fit in that space easily.

So there's a few things you can do here.

the first one is just to like scale this up and then you don't really want it doing that, hitting send to back.

and then that could work and then you could maybe change the position here on the horizontal axis a bit.

and then that could look okay as well.

but in this case you're always going to have to be mindful of using this layout relative to what's actually happening on the screen.

but you can be a bit more deliberate about this with cropping your actual screen recording here.

And so I'm going to bring this down to here say cut out all of the chrome that I don't need, like that.

And then I'm going to kind of go to about here and let's see how that looks.

and so we can just fill that space and that's a bit closer to what we want.

But again with this type of thing, you do have to play around with the crop and the layout but you can kind of get this quite nice 50, 50 look, you should just be careful where you use something like this because again you're limiting what can actually be visible on the screen to quite a narrow spot.

If you ahead of time that you want to make a video like this, you can actually resize the original thing that you're recording, whether it's a window, or you, are selecting an error on your screen.

Using the Mac app, you can make that optimized to fit in a space like this, so that you don't have to deal with perhaps your cursor moving off screen or some text not fitting on screen.

So that is a introduction to our new custom layouts feature.

Custom layouts also works with camera only clips, screen only clips and when you use different sized aspect ratios of our canvas so you can use it with our square canvases and our 9 by 16 canvases as well.

Thanks for watching.

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