Choppy Video? Improve Camtasia Studio Recordings... (Visual Lounge)

Choppy Video? Improve Camtasia Studio Recordings...

Posted on Monday July 27, 2009 by Betsy Weber

No one likes to watch a choppy screencast, a flashing mouse cursor, or jerky video. If you're having problems getting smooth recordings, fear not fellow screencaster! There are a couple different ways you can avoid these problems and get the better performance with Camtasia Studio.

One way is starting out with the ideal computer for Camtasia Studio. But, before you go out and buy a new computer, there are many other steps you can take to improve your performance.

There's a new tutorial in our Learning Center all about how to improve your recording performance.

In the tutorial you will learn:

* Basic Tips to Improve Recording Performance
* Understand Challenges when Recording High-Motion Content
* Using DivX to Record High-Motion Content

Check out the tutorial here.

Any suggestions for new tutorials? What would you like to learn more about?

Comments (1)

Torley :

Heya Betsy! I'm glad to see this tut and that you guys suggest Divx as an option.

However, my cautionary tale: after much experimentation I found myself using DivX as well — but some configurations of it are very buggy and crash-prone. For instance, I updated to DivX 7 on my Win XP system and it showed the encoder as being 6.8.5 (I think), but I couldn't get Camtasia to work after that, just one crash after another. :( I eventually wiped my entire Windows PC, upgraded to Vista with the K-Lite Codec Pack, and am using DivX again.

DivX exhibits some strange tearing and blockiness artifacts at times like when there's a LOT of motion. To boost framerate even more, there are specific options you can tune like a "High performance" encoding mode as shown: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Torley_Linden/Vidtut_process ... that got me close to 30 FPS when I needed it.

Given DivX's awkwardness to setup, especially for newcomers, I hope there'll be a lossy Techsmith Camtasia codec that's optimized for a variety of content. (Screenflow on Mac appears to have done this very well.)