# Help With Camtasia Studio



## blue_streak (Mar 1, 2009)

I think this is the most appropriate place for this.

I need help from someone who is an expert with Camtasia Studio v5. Help with any of the points would be much appreciated.

I am trying to record a screen capture video and produce it in the desired format but I have quite a few questions which need answering.

1. What versions of Adobe Flash (and related tools) should I have

2. How do I ensure that my web visitors are most likely to be able to view my video without any problems and not show any Flash errors

3. How do I ensure there won't be any problems with thousands of people viewing the video at the same time? Any advice on setting up with Amazonaws.com

4. I need you to work with me. I will record a short sample video and you can tell me where I've gone wrong.
I can also record the Camtasia Studio options I'm choosing.

5. Recording setting required + Production setting required. Recommended screen resolutions.

6. After recording and producing a video, how do I load it back into Camtasia so I can try producing it again with different settings? (when I try and import it, it forces the screen resolution to be reduced.) Where is the file stored?

7. How do I stop the timeline being shown on the produced video? I do not want my visitor to be able to control the playback or see how much time is left to play.

For example see:


*DELETED LINK*

(I'm not sure if this is done in Camtasia but this is similar to how I want to show it)

8. How can I set it up so I can show both powerpoint slides + screen capture in the same video?

9. How can I show text above the video? Again like in
*DELETED LINK*

10. Which option should I be choosing: One Video, Express video or Legacy SWF? The only one which seems to allow "no playback controls" as an option is the legacy option.


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## Done_Fishin (Oct 10, 2006)

can you please supply an alternative link that doesn't appear to be like someone is trying to spam this forum 

I am deleting the link since it is not in line with forum rules ..


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## blah789 (Aug 25, 2008)

blue_streak said:


> I need help from someone who is an expert with Camtasia Studio v5. Help with any of the points would be much appreciated.


Not an expert, but I'll try to answer the parts I can.



blue_streak said:


> 1. What versions of Adobe Flash (and related tools) should I have


If you mean flash player, I'd say the later the better. They just updated it to 10.0.22.87 very recently.



blue_streak said:


> 2. How do I ensure that my web visitors are most likely to be able to view my video without any problems and not show any Flash errors


If you have more than one machine to test on (if not, try Microsoft Virtual PC to create virtual machines - they would be various instances of various versions of Windows that run inside a window inside Windows) try testing it with the default version of flash bundled with Windows (with no patches installed). It could be version 8 or earlier if someone just installed XP SP2 or something. Try it with as many versions of Windows and IE as possible. Also try it with alternate browsers like Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari.
On the production end, if you're using flash instead of camtasia producer, look in the documentation or in the production settings to see if there's a setting for producing videos with legacy support for older versions of flash. Usually it's a trade-off: something that works with older versions may trim down on features that are available to newer version. You'll have to make a choice what the cutoff point should be.



blue_streak said:


> 3. How do I ensure there won't be any problems with thousands of people viewing the video at the same time? Any advice on setting up with Amazonaws.com


I have no experience with load balancing or bandwidth allocation. Unless you're hosting the file yourself, I think it's something you would have to ask your host.



blue_streak said:


> 4. I need you to work with me. I will record a short sample video and you can tell me where I've gone wrong.
> I can also record the Camtasia Studio options I'm choosing.


There's a lot of ways to do this. It also depends on what program you want to do your end output.
There's really three parts to this: recording, editing, then final production.
I'm looking in Camtasia Studio now (I'm testing a trial version of version 4) and it appears the flash options (under custom presets) have swf and flv choices, and if you pick flv you have the choice of H.263 and VP6. I wonder if H.264 is available in version 5.
In any case, if you want to do intermediate editing in other programs, I suggest recording your videos as avi as opposed to camrec. Then you can edit them in whatever program you want, then feed the output to camtasia studio for final production to flash (or whatever program you want to use to make the final flash video).



blue_streak said:


> 5. Recording setting required + Production setting required. Recommended screen resolutions.


It entirely depends on what you're recording and what you're doing. Recommended screen resolution can just be the default resolution of the window you're recording (I'm assuming you're recording windows on your desktop to create demos on how to use programs?). Recording settings like I said should be output to AVI (it's under tools, options in camtasia recorder). Camtasia is fairly good and uses a lossless codec for compression (which itself is smart in that it doesn't add anymore data to the video if there is no change in the scene).
I then suggest you do some editing in an intermediate program (perhaps to annotate, add, join, cut, etc...) for example virtualdub.
When you produce, if you use camtasia studio, you can use whatever you want. If you want control over it, I suggest using custom presets and playing with the settings and seeing how they fit with you.



blue_streak said:


> 6. After recording and producing a video, how do I load it back into Camtasia so I can try producing it again with different settings? (when I try and import it, it forces the screen resolution to be reduced.) Where is the file stored?


camtasia recorder does the recording (at least that's what you should use for recording).
when you're done, the file is saved in your documents, camtasia/something (don't recall the name of the folder).
when you do your editing (for example in camtasia studio) you can load your recordings from there.



blue_streak said:


> 7. How do I stop the timeline being shown on the produced video? I do not want my visitor to be able to control the playback or see how much time is left to play.


If you produce your video as flv, playback is controlled by flash code (for example the bar you see in youtube isn't the same as you would see elsewher - that's the "player" portion of the swf code to play the flv file). You'd have to know how to modify it and it is possible to do it such that there is no play or pause button.
If you produce your video as swf, I don't think there's anyway to remove that, because the way camtasia studio embeds everything puts the play button inside the flash animation.



blue_streak said:


> 8. How can I set it up so I can show both powerpoint slides + screen capture in the same video?


Not sure what you mean there. If you're seeing a black screen when recording video, turn off hardware acceleration temporarily (it's in the advanced settings in recording).



blue_streak said:


> 9. How can I show text above the video? Again like in
> *DELETED LINK*


Can't see your link, but you can annotate the video in youtube (not sure how it's done - look on their site for documentation). You can also annotate your video using 2. edit, caption on the left in camtasia studio.



blue_streak said:


> 10. Which option should I be choosing: One Video, Express video or Legacy SWF? The only one which seems to allow "no playback controls" as an option is the legacy option.


Note sure there. Try and see what works best.


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