In this article, I’m going to show you how to make an animated subscribe button that will go across your screen as you’re talking on your YouTube video. When I first tried to do this, I google “green screen subscribe” and I found videos that said you can have free screens. So, I literally went in and videotaped them and then used them. But. it’s so much more difficult to do it that way.

Instead, I’m going to show you how to do this in Canva the easy way.

Creating The Thumbnail

First, you want to log into Canva. I’m using a Pro account but if you don’t have one of those yet, go ahead and click this link and you can get a 30-day free trial. I highly recommend it if you haven’t tried it yet because if you don’t like it, it doesn’t cost you anything.

The first thing we want to do is make a little animated video. I’ll show you how to make it with the green screen and also without. Plus, you’re going to find out which one is more important.

Here are the steps for you to follow:

• Go to elements and search for “subscribe”.

• Place this onto your thumbnail template.

• Animate the element that you’ve selected. There are plenty of animation choices to select from. You can make your image tumble, rise, or even breathe. Have some fun and play around with all the different animation possibilities until you find one that you like. I really like the “tectonic” one that makes your subscribe button slide across the screen really slowly.

• Select the perfect amount of time that you want your subscribe button to appear.

Now, if you were to use this thumbnail as it is when you download it, it’s going to have a white background. So, we want to add a second thumbnail with a green screen so that you can see the difference.

• On the same template, click add a page, add a subscribe button and animate it.

• Go back into “elements” and search for “green screen”.

• Take one of the photos of the green screen and place it onto the template and move it to the back.

Now you want to download each page of your thumbnail template separately and make sure that you select MP4 video when you’re downloading.

Adding The Subscribe Button To The Video Using Camtasia

As you probably know, I use Camtasia to edit all my videos. There are a lot of different software tools out there for editing videos, but I prefer this one.

What I did was add both of the subscribe buttons so that I could show you the difference between them. First, I placed the button with the green screen on top of my video and this is what you see.

As you can see, the video with the green screen is covering me talking and that’s definitely not what you see when you watch videos on YouTube. Normally, you just see the “subscribe button” running across the screen but you can still see the presenter’s face. So, how do we get rid of the green?

You’ll see on the left, there’s a button that says “visual effects”. When you click on this, you’ll have the option to “remove a color”. When you click this, you need to select the green color and then use the dropper to remove the green.

When I did the same thing with the subscribe button that had the white background and removed the white color, this is what happened.

As you can see, it removed all the white color from the subscribe button as well. This is why you need to create the animated subscribe button with the green screen background.

Creating A Subscribe Overlay The Easy Way

What about if you’re in a hurry and you don’t have time to make your own overlay? Let me show a really easy way to get that “subscribe” overlay.

Let’s go back into Canva to our template.

• Search for “youtube subscribe” this time and click on “videos”.

When you do this, you’ll see a range of subscribe videos that are already made and you can just add them to your template without creating your own.

Just remember to remove the green screen when you add the subscribe buttons to your videos.

Hopefully, you’ve learned something new today and have found this helpful to show you how you can add an animated subscribe button to your videos. Don’t forget to click the Canva link to get your 30-day free trial. I also have a link for Camtasia if you’re not already using it to edit your videos. I even have some other videos and articles that show you some different ways to use this tool.

You’ve Got This!