Something new under the hood
Posted on Wednesday July 20, 2011
Camtasia for Mac users may have noticed something different in your screencast projects after installing our free Lion-ready update a couple of weeks ago. It's the good kind of different, not the other kind.
The version history for Camtasia for Mac 1.2.2 includes this rather modest item: "Overall improved recording performance." What, in fact, happened is that our development team rewrote the TechSmith Capture Codec, a core element of our recording engine.
And with today's release of Camtasia Relay 3.1, users of our enterprise product on both Mac and Windows get this new, under-the-hood technology too!
How does this benefit you? First, by making your content look better than ever. Second, by saving you time and hard drive space when working with project files.
Smoother recordings
Any high-motion content you capture will look smoother. High motion content being things like PowerPoint or Keynote animations, a Flash game, a movie trailer (for educational or journalistic purposes, please), and even everyday screen recordings that have lots of activity going on. And because the new recording engine demands less of your system resources (CPU), desktop applications that you're recording should behave much more responsively—more like they do when you're not recording them.
So go nuts and add a little more motion to your screencast projects!
This video illustrates the difference between the old and new capture engine... (click here if you can't see the video below)
Camtasia already did a great job of maintaining visual clarity or sharpness of shapes and text on screen. So the noticeable improvement here is in higher frame rates, resulting in smooth motion that more closely mirrors the original content. Take a look at 00:09, for example, and notice the difference in Captain Jing's hands.
To make this comparison video, our instructional designer, Conan (a.k.a., @camtasiamac), played back a Captain Jing video at 1440 x 900 (a common resolution for laptops) and captured it off the screen. He captured it once with Camtasia for Mac 1.2 and once with Camtasia for Mac 1.2.2, then put both clips together on the canvas at reduced dimensions and produced an MP4. Conan used a MacBook Pro with 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM on OS X 10.6.8, in case you were wondering.
With your own projects, expect to see increased benefit from the new codec as you capture content with more motion and at larger dimensions. The differences can become very extreme at the highest dimensions, as illustrated by another capture Conan did at 1920 x 1200.
Faster transport of recordings
Normally when you boost video quality or framerate, the file size also increases. But somehow our dev team managed to suspend one of the laws of nature and dramatically decreased the file sizes of recordings.

The graph shows comparative recording file sizes for various types of content we tested. Every recording is unique (which is why we left off the units) but the point is, your recording files should be a lot smaller now. By way of example, the Captain Jing capture above was 304MB using the old codec and 94MB using the new one.
If you're using Camtasia Relay, this means it takes less time for the raw recording to upload from your computer to the server. And people using the portable recorder can fit more minutes of recording on a thumb drive.
And Camtasia for Mac users will save a lot of time and hard drive space when storing, backing up, or transporting project files. Handy when you're working with a team or storing your stuff in the cloud.
We realize that this kind of under-the-hood improvement may not seem sexy, but we knew it would help you deliver higher quality videos to your viewers and spend less time doing it...which seemed to us like a win!
Please let us know what kind of impact you see on your own projects, both in terms of smoother motion and smaller recording files. Leave a comment on this post or find us on Twitter, Facebook, or our new Q&A forum.

Daniel Foster is the "social media guy" for TechSmith. He enjoys iceboating, ice cream socials, and isosceles triangles. Tweet him up @fosteronomo or put him in a Google+ Circle.





















