 If you watch any kind of video content on platforms like YouTube or Odyssey, you probably notice people using really cool animations. They animate their logos and the titles of their videos, similar to the animation you just saw at the beginning of this video. Sometimes they'll do animations with like a click and subscribe button. So you'll see like a YouTube subscribe button appear on the screen, then you'll see a mouse cursor appear and double click it. And you'll even get the sound, the double clicky sound with it. How do people create these cool animations and get them in their videos? Today I'm going to show you how I achieve this using free and open source software, namely the GIMP and Kaden Live. Now GIMP is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, so it's cross-platform. Kaden Live is available on Windows and Linux. I don't believe it is available on Mac though. So the first thing I want to do is I need to create some images because we can't animate any images in Kaden Live, the video editor, until we create some images. So let's open up GIMP and actually create something. So I'm just going to create something rather simple. So let's go ahead and create a new project here. It's going to do 1920 by 1080, the resolution, that's fine. That's a bigger size than I need, but we can always scale it down later. And it shows a white background because my foreground and background colors here were red and white. I actually want a transparent background though. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a CTRL-X to cut everything that was visible there. And then I'm going to create a new layer and click OK. Now by doing this new layer, now our background is transparent. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to just create some simple text in some boxes. So let's just create a box. I'll create this box here. I'm just going to draw it using the rectangle tool. And then I'm going to use the bucket field tool. And my foreground color here is red. So if I just do a shift and click in the box, it will make that box red. Now what I want to do is I'm going to click the rectangle tool again. I'm going to click outside of the red rectangle to no longer have that as the focus area here. And then I'm going to do a new area. And this new area will be a second color. I'll do it slightly resist inside the white box. I'm going to reverse the colors here, red and white here. And then go to the bucket field tool and do shift, click again and fill that with white color. Now let's create some text. So once again, I'll click outside the box to get that not have focus anymore. And then I'm going to click the text tool. And what do I want my text to read? What do I want my YouTube channel logo to be? Maybe my channel name is GNU Linux. I think that would be a rather cool name. Now let me go ahead and put it over the box so we can actually size it correctly so the text fits the box. And obviously it's not correct right now. So let's resize this until GNU and Linux look like they kind of fit. One thing is because this white text here in Linux, let me highlight Linux here. And then in this box, I'm going to click the white background and change that to red. We'll just kind of reverse the colors there. And that's starting to look a little better. Still not quite right as far as the size. Let's keep going here until I think the size is pretty close. I think that is probably okay. Kind of center it a little bit. I can actually work with that there. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click the rectangle tool again, the select tool and then click outside the box. And then what I'm going to do is let's go ahead and trim off some of the excess space here. So I'm going to do the rectangle tool on that section and do control X to cut. But it didn't cut anything because we're on an empty layer. Let me merge down all the layers. All right. So now that all the layers have been merged, now let me do that control X and cut that off. And then we also got some excess white space over here. What I'll do here is going to click a section here and just control X to get rid of that. And then I'm going to select this control X, control V to paste. And then I'm just going to move that in a little closer here. See, I didn't quite line that up correctly. Let me zoom in a little so I can make sure that I get this precisely where I want it. Yeah. Now let's zoom back out. And that would be my logo if you will. Now, obviously that was a very quick and dirty kind of logo, but this is just an example. Now I actually don't need this image to be this size because all of this background, this transparent background is kind of wasted space. So I'm just going to choose just to have a little bit of a transparent background border. And then I'm going to do control X. And then I'm going to go to edit and I'm going to paste as a new image. And then I'm going to save this new image. So I will go to file and I'm going to export as because I'm going to export it as a ping. I'm going to go to videos and I'm just going to dump this here and I'll just do new Linux logo dot ping. Let's export that. And that's really the only image I think I'm going to create for creating this animated logo drop that I'm going to do. So let me go ahead and close out of GIMP. So now let's go ahead and open up our video editor. So I'm going to use Kaden live. Kaden live is the best free and open source video editor available. It is really fantastic. Very feature rich. Got a lot of professional kinds of features to it that you would expect a good video editor to have. And let's go ahead and let's go ahead and get this animation created. So typically how I do this is I use title clips so you can create a title clip. You could right click in the project bin and choose add title clip or you could go up here to project and click add title clip. Either one works. Typically I just right click in the empty bin add title clip. And then here is where you can do things like add text. You know, if I had the text thing open, we could just add texture. I actually do not want to do text. So let's get rid of that. You could also draw shapes. So here's the rectangle. So you could draw a shape and then add text on top of it. Or you can do images, which is what we're going to do here. I'm actually just going to do an image here. So I'm going to add image and then I'm going to navigate to videos. I'm going to add that GNU Linux ping that we created. Now imagine we're previewing a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution right now. This image we created is much bigger than what we probably want to appear on the screen. But you can actually resize what you can do is go up here to zoom is 100%. I'm going to drop that to 50%. 50% looks maybe a little small. Let's bump that up to 60%. Yeah, I think that would probably look nicely on the screen right there. So I'm going to go with that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click create title. And we need to rename it because by default it names all these title clips as title clip. And we want to give it a descriptive name because we're going to be dealing with several clips here. So I'm going to rename and I will say GNU Linux logo there. Then I want to create a second title clip. So add title clip and this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to create some text. I'm going to create what would have been the title of the video. So GNU Linux is my channel name and the video I'm doing today is I'd like to interject for a moment. I think that's a good title of a video. And then I'm going to put that down here. I'd like for this to appear up under the logo, maybe off center a little bit. And then we need to give it a background. So I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and I'm going to draw a rectangle on top of the text. Now the rectangle here, you can choose solid colors. I've chosen to have a little bit of transparency. You see alpha channel 180. If I set that to 255, it'd be solid black. But I wanted a transparent black background, but you could do anything. If you wanted to, you could do a gradient background. And then with gradient background, you select two different colors. So I've chosen black and then a slightly lighter black. It's a dark gray here. So you get a nice gradient effect. Of course, that's not transparent. And you put the box over the text. You can't read the text. Well, what you need to do is you have the Z index here. So Z index is how these items stack on top of each other as far as what is visible. Just make sure the Z index of the box is lower than the Z index of your text. I'm going to go ahead and create this title too. And it named it. I'd like to interject because we had some text in it. So it automatically just names it whatever text you had in the clip. And that's fine. Then I'm going to drag these into the timeline and the video timeline. I'm going to do this on video two. We're going to make this rather long because this clip is going to be probably 10 to 15 seconds when it's part of a video. By default, it likes to make these clips five seconds long here in Cayden Live. So we're going to do this. I'm going to do that. And I just want to see where they stack up. You know, are they pretty close? Actually, I got those pretty close. The GNU Linux logo is slightly on top of I'd like to interject for a moment. So what I'm going to do is I need to edit one of these and either move GNU Linux up or I'd like to interject for a moment down. I think I'm going to move the GNU Linux up a little bit. So we're just going to drag that up slightly and update the title. And I'm going to scrub through the timeline and you see I've got a little bit of a gap now. So I moved it slightly too far. Eventually I'm going to get it just right though and just move it down a little bit. Now when we scrub it, I'm still a little bit on top of it for fine tuning. What I could do is when I edit the clip, I can zoom in. I can make this window bigger and then we're only zoomed in to 42%. I could actually zoom in to like 72% and really make these adjustments a little finer here. So now I'm really close, right? I'm just a little bit on top of that, but you know what? I'm going to go with it now for just purposes of this video. Now normally I would try to get that as precise as possible. Now what I would like to happen is I would like the GNU Linux logo to slide from off-screen to the left into position. And then I would like to interject for a moment video title clip to actually slide into position from off-screen at the bottom of the screen into position. So to do this we would need to use the slide composition. If you go to compositions in the composition and effect window here and search for slide, you will find that effect. You could right click on it and add to your favorites. I've already added it to my favorites. And what this does is favorites allows you to just right click on a track and go to insert a composition and your favorite compositions are already there. So I could add slide to the GNU Linux logo and I'm going to tell it to start off-screen on the left. And then the center is, hey, I want you then slide into position onto the screen where I've got the title clip properly set, which is, you know, this area of the screen here. So I want you to be transparent also off the screen. So start with fully transparent, sliding into position and becoming, you know, fully opaque once you finally land into position. I hope that makes sense. And then what I'm going to do is I'd like to interject for a moment. I'm going to insert a composition, slide, and I want you to slide from off-screen at the bottom again, fully transparent and then slide into position. And if I did this correctly, let's go ahead and play this. Maybe kind of hard to see this effect because, well, you got the sliding effect. One of the things is right now we don't have a proper background, right? It's just a black background. What I probably should do is go ahead and add like a video clip from one of my past videos. I'll go ahead and drag something into the timeline here. Actually, that's the video clip of me actually recording this video, but that will work just fine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to add this to the timeline, but what I need is I need these to be higher up in the stack here. Then I'm going to add this here, and we don't need to really hear my audio. I could mute it. I'll just make the volume really, really low, so it's barely audible. And now let's see this effect. All right, pretty cool, right? Now the GNU Linux logo, it started instead of sliding from the left, it's sliding from like the bottom left. It's like it's getting caught up in the slide effect from the bottom with the I'd like to interject for a moment, right? Let me just scrub that. The I'd like to interject for a moment is doing exactly what I wanted, but the GNU Linux, I don't know, I could take that. I was kind of wanting a different kind of effect. What I could do though is offset these a little bit. What I could do is GNU Linux does its effect first, and then we get the clip with I'd like to interject for a moment. But the slide effect is not going to work that way with GNU Linux because we don't have a title clip up underneath it. The slide effect needs something up underneath it to work. Well, what I could do to make that happen, add title clip. I'm not going to add anything to this title clip. It's just going to be a transparent background. So create title, and then I'm going to rename it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just call it alpha. And then this alpha clip here, resize it, make it small enough so I can fit it in here. And now with this just empty title clip, I should get the slide effect now for GNU Linux. There we go. Slides from the left and the title slides from the bottom. Very cool. And that's pretty cool. You know, things just sliding into position. And of course I could do a slide at the end to also have them slide out of position as well. You know, slide them back off screen. Let's go ahead and do that while we're thinking about it. So I'm going to insert a slide again here at the end. This time I want GNU Linux to slide from position off screen to the left. And then I want it to become transparent as it's sliding back off screen. And then let's go ahead and add a slide effect here. Once again, go to the favorites. And this time I want you to slide from your position on screen, off screen at the bottom, become transparent as you're sliding off screen. And then this alpha clip, I'm going to just click on it. I'm going to do a control C to copy. And then I'm going to move over here and paste that here. And hopefully now we should get a slide in and out of position for both title clips. If you watch any kind of video content on platforms like YouTube or Odyssey, that was very nice. Really cool animations. They animate their logos. That was quite cool, I think. Now, if I wanted to, I could play with these effects even more. For example, maybe at some point I want some kind of zoom effect or I want an image to rotate a little bit, change position, you know, something other than just sliding into place, staying there for a second and then sliding out of place. Now let's jazz it up a little more. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in a little bit on the timeline. I'm going to do control and the mouse wheel so we can get a little bit longer timeline here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to clip this very top track here, which is the good new Linux logo. I'm just going to make a very small incision, you know, probably like a one second frame here, maybe even less than a second. And then what I'm going to do is let's add some effects to this. So let's go to the effects stack and search for zoom. And I want position and zoom. I'm going to drag that into that small little clip. And then now when I click on it, we get the position and zoom effect here. And now we can tell it, you know, what do we want to do? I want this to zoom in. I don't know. I want it to become about 30% or 40% bigger than what it currently is. Let's try 130%. And now let me scrub through the timeline. And when I get to that point, yeah, it's going to become quite a bit bigger. But of course, it becomes quite a bit bigger. But now it's kind of out of place. You can't even read part of the logo because it's off screen. So we need to adjust some stuff so we could adjust the X position and the Y position, for example. So let's keep adjusting the X position until it's actually where we want it. That's really, I don't want the X position or the Y position really to be that different. What I would like it to be is still on top of the title, but just bigger. I would just keep playing with this. I'm going to do a minus 200 on the Y. That's pretty close. Let's do a minus 300. That's too much. So now let's split the difference. Let's do minus 250. And we're getting closer. I do the mouse wheel. I can actually adjust this to just right. Something like that, maybe. Let's see how this looks in action. So let's go ahead and preview this. If you watch any kind of video. Here comes the zoom like YouTube or Odyssey. You probably notice people using really cool. Very subtle. I don't know if I would be, you know, totally happy with that. But it was kind of a neat effect. One thing I think I want is when it zooms in for that split second and zooms back out, it would be great if it was rotated a little bit. What I want to do is I could click on that and go to effects. Let's look for a rotate effect. A rotate and shear or rotate key frameable. It really doesn't matter. I'm going to do rotate and shear. I'm just going to drag that onto that clip and now click on it. Now I have two effects in the stack. I have position and zoom and then of course rotate and shear. Make that bigger so you can read the words here. And then what I want to do is I really don't want to do anything too complicated here. I think I just want it about 70 degrees off access here. So if I scrub that just to see, yeah, that actually looks pretty cool. So I'm going to zoom back out on the timeline and what I'm going to do, get back to the beginning. And let's actually play this and see how all of this actually looks. Start and hit play. If you watch any kind of video content on platforms like YouTube or Odyssey, you'll probably notice people using really cool animations. That's kind of a similar effect to what I was doing in the logo at the beginning of this video. Now let's assume that this animation is exactly the way we want it and we're good with it, but we want to be able to use this animation anytime we want. How do you do that? Well, first let's get rid of this test video clip that we had added because that was just there mainly just to make it easy for us to see what was going on with these clips. And the last thing you need to know though, the slide effect, remember for the slide effect to work, it needs to be on top of another transparent layer, which is great for this one. But now that we deleted my video, I'd like to interject for a moment. These slide effects are not going to work until you add another transparent layer below it. So what you need to do is I'm just going to drag this alpha title clip underneath it. On the very bottom layer, what you want to do is you want to add an effect called alpha top. Alpha top, I have in my favorites. If you didn't have it in your favorites, you would go to believe it's in effects. If you search for alpha, no, it's in compositions, alpha compositions. And there is alpha top. And you want to make sure that the alpha top effect is the entire clip of that transparent title clip at the bottom. And now let me just scrub through it to make sure the animations work, including this one here, because this is the one that is likely not to work. Well, we're not going to get it in the preview, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to assume it's going to work. What I'm going to do is I'm going to save this. I'm going to go to file, save as, I'm going to save it. I've got a projects folder here, and I'm going to save this as GNU Linux. And now let's imagine later I'm editing one of my videos. Let's start a new project. And we're going to make it 1080, 60 frames per second. And I'm going to import just one clip. No reason to import a whole bunch of stuff here. And then let's go ahead and add this, add this to the timeline. Once again, I will get rid of the volume. I just mute it this time. And then what I'm going to do is I have a projects directory here in videos. I'm going to go into projects. I'm going to find GNU Linux. Many people don't know you can actually add Kaden live projects to the project bin. Many people assume you can only add video clips. No, you can actually save your Kaden live projects and add them. And you can just drag them into the timeline. Now, I don't want to drag this into the timeline because it's going to include a audio and a video track. And there's actually no audio right to this because we didn't add any. But that empty audio track is going to cause some problems. It causes weird audio distortion and things like that. So make sure you actually find the little video icon for the project and just grab the video to add to your project. And now let's play this and see if this works correctly. Here comes the animation and just the bottom animation work it does. Okay, so adding the alpha top effect to that bottom layer did work. And that is how you would now forever just add this animated logo to a video. You just import this saved Kaden live project anytime you want it. Another way you could do it is you could actually render that GNU Linux Kaden live project. I could go to render and just have the project, not the video clip, but just the project. I would just need to make sure I output it to a video format that allows for a transparent background. Any video formats don't allow for transparency, right? They don't know what to do with it. So you couldn't use something like MP4, for example. You would need to go to something like video with alpha, this category here, and output it to one of these formats. And then you could just use that rendered video clip, you know, the same way. But I like keeping the project file, the Kaden live project file because you may want to edit things, right? For example, in this particular clip, you know, we've got the logo that appears, and then we've got the title of the video that appears. If I rendered that to a proper video file, I could never change the title of that video, right? But having this as a Kaden live project anytime I want to change the title that appears in that second box, all I need to do is just open up the GNU Linux Kaden live project, just change the text in it, and boom, it's changed in this video here. So earlier I mentioned that you can also add sound effects to these animated clips. For example, I mentioned the click and subscribe button where you see a YouTube subscribe button and a mouse clicks on it, and you hear the little double clicky sound. Let me show you how that is achieved. It's achieved very easily. I'm going to open up a second instance of Kaden live. And I've got one of my recent projects here. I'm just going to show you my click and subscribe little animation. You guys have seen this where I get a subscribe button that appears off screen slides into position. Then I get the mouse cursor and then I do a zoom effect and I time the zoom effect perfectly with this audio clip. It's just the double click of a mouse. And there are plenty of websites where you can go find free audio clips. The biggest one is the free sound library. And if you go into online resources here, so do the project bin, do the menu here, go to online resources, and a window should appear. In my case it appears on the far right. This is the free sound library. You can just search for something like, I don't know, double click or whatever it is, mouse click or whatever key words you want to use. And you'll get a bunch of clips that appear here. And then it'll give you the option to either preview the clip if you want to hear it or to import it into your project. Now it will not just automatically import it into your project. You do need an account with the free sound website. So you do have to sign up to use free sound. There are a ton of websites available though where you can go find these cool sound effects. It's not hard to get any sound effect that you're after. And now that I've got this animated logo project here, of course I've saved it. And then I can go ahead and add this project, you know, import it just like I did the logo project. So I'm going to go ahead and add a clip or a folder. I'm going to add animated, subscribe and click dot Kaden live. So that Kaden live project you just saw a minute ago. And on this one, because I did have some audio with it, I want to drag both the audio and the video with it. And I'm just going to drag it right here. And let's see how this works with both clips now. So now we get the animated logo and the title of the video is going to appear. We get the zoom here in a minute and the rotate. And then everything slides back off screen. And then here in a few seconds we should get that subscribe button sliding into position. And then the mouse cursor and then the double click. Very nice. And we even get the nice sound effect. So that is how that is achieved. So it's very, very easy to work with the gimp and Kaden live to create your images and then to create these nice animations in your videos. I have been using the gimp for nearly 15 years. I was using the gimp actually before I started using Linux. I knew what it was because it was a free and open source alternative to Photoshop and paint shop pro and all those proprietary image editors. You know, years ago the gimp has been around for a long time. Matter of fact, I use the gimp for all of my thumbnails for all the channel artwork. I've used the gimp to merchandise. You guys see I'm got my Ubuntu definition shirt here. By the way, check out my Teespring store. If you guys want this shirt, by the way, I will link to it in the description. It's actually turned out really nice. I'm very happy how the Ubuntu definition turned out as far as Kaden live goes. I think it's the best video editor on the planet. Not even kidding. I don't care about your proprietary editors. I know on Linux we do have DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks. You know, two of the most popular proprietary video editors, you know, professional grade video editors, but I don't need them. You know, I don't want to use proprietary software. I want to use free software. And as far as Kaden live goes, I think it competes with those products. I really do. I'm not even joking and it keeps getting better. One of the things about Kaden live is there's constant releases. They keep releasing new releases, adding new features. Stability has been an issue in the past. But here in the last couple of years, I've noticed it's been a stable product. Like I don't get crashes. You know, back in the day it used to be a bit of a crash fest. I'm not going to lie, but these days I find it very stable. I can't recommend it enough to you guys. You guys that want to get into video content creation. And if you're on Windows and or Linux, I strongly recommend giving Kaden live a try. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Absi, Gabe, James, Mitchell, Paul, Wes, Akami, Alan, Chuck, Kurt, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiko, Erion, Alexander, Pee, Sargent, Fedor, Polytech, Raver, Scott, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to support it, please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. Hopefully Ubuntu users can take a joke.