Media

Add images, videos, animated GIFs, icons, Lottie Animations, and logos to your scenes.

Adding media elements to a scene

Add images, videos, animated GIFs, icons, Lottie animations, and logos to your scene by clicking the Media button in the toolbar.

Stock Content

The stock content available to you includes:

  • Videos and images from Getty and Pexels
  • GIFs from Giphy
  • Icons from Icons8
  • Brand logos from Brandfetch

Your Library

Click on Library to access images and videos that have already been uploaded to your Library. You can also upload new media for use in just this video with the Upload media button, or upload media directly to your Library with the Upload media to library button (that way, you'll have access to it from your Library when you create new videos).

Editing media

To control the style of your imported media on your scene, select it, then adjust the settings in the Inspector Panel on the right side of the edit.

Editing Images

After you have selected an image in your scene, using the right-side menu available you can:

  • Replace the image with another one.
  • Change the image Opacity, blur and border radius
  • Adjust the image shadows on your scene.

To further edit your image, select the 3-dots in the upper right corner of the right-side menu:

  • Crop: Crops the selected image to only display a subset of it when playing with its borders on the scene.
  • Contain: Contains the selected image when playing with its borders on the scene.
  • Cover: Covers the selected image to only display a subset of it when playing with its borders on the scene.
  • + Add variable : Associate a given variable to this image. In a video all images that have the same variable name have their style updated together.

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Note:

Variables allow you to use Synthesia's API to control the content of your videos. See the Guide: Create a video from template page to discover how to leverage this feature.

You can also use variables to automate video creation by using Synthesia's Zapier integration. See the Guide: Synthesia <> Zapier integration to get started.

Editing Lottie Animations

After you have selected the Lottie Animations in your scene, using the right-side menu available, you can:

  • Change the Lottie animation Opacity
  • Change the Lottie animation colors
  • Loop or not the Lottie animation.

Editing videos

To access all of the different video editing options in the inspector panel, select your video in the canvas.

Video playback

Playback settingDescription
OnceThe video will play all of the way through one time, at its original playback speed, regardless of the length of the script.

If your video is longer than the duration of your scene, a pause will automatically be added to the end of the script to account for the discrepancy between the two.
StretchThe playback speed of the video will either speed up or slow down to fit the duration of the scene.

If the video you've added to the scene has audio, the audio within the video itself will be affected.

For this reason, we recommend that you set the video's volume slider to 0% when using the stretch playback setting.
Loop/CutThe video will play at its original playback speed, and will be either looped or cut based on the duration of the script.

Cut: If the script is shorter than the recording, the video will be cut off when the script ends.

Loop: If the script is longer than the video is, the video will loop and play again as many times as needed to match the duration of the script.

Trim

To trim a video, click the Trim button in the inspector panel.

This will open up the video editor:

The seek bar at the bottom is where you'll make your edits:

Click the preview button the preview your edits, and drag the zoom slider to increase or decrease the specificity of the timeline to make it easier to make more precise edits to the clip.

You can undo any edits you make to the video by clicking the undo button in the toolbar, or by using the keyboard shortcut.

Once you're satisfied, click the Done button to return to the scene.

Trim

  • Click and drag the trim handle on the left to the right to trim the beginning of the video.
  • Click and drag the trim handle on the right to the left to trim the end of the video.

In either case, you can restore a portion of, or all of the trimmed content by clicking and dragging the handle in the opposite direction.

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Note:

You can't make the total duration of the video shorter than 1 second by trimming.

Split

Splitting allows you to divide your video clip into segments. You can choose to either duplicate the segment, add the segment to a new scene, or delete it.

To split your video clip, you can either:

  • Drag the blue seeker handle along the timeline to where you want to split it, then click the Split at time button.
  • Mouse over where you'd like to split the video in the timeline, then right click. The seeker will jump to that time, and you'll open a menu. Click the Split at time option to create a segment.

After you've split the video into segments, you'll be able to trim the beginning and the end of each segment.

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Note:

Segments must be at least 1 second long.