Tech Watch: Camtasia Update (Breaking Change)

[Rodney]

This is for folks that use TechSmith's Camtasia screen recording software.

 

With the recent update to Camtasia 8.4 the recording file format has changed to allow full compatibility between PC and Mac. Good news.

The bad news is that this change makes files recorded in the latest release incompatible with earlier releases. You can't open them, etc.

This is something to consider if you use more than one release version of Camtasia or work with other who do.

 

Note that a general workaround is to save/produce the content as a video file and share that but all of the specialized recording data (mouse movement etc.) will be lost (flattened?) as you do.

 

Also noted, Camtasia is still a 32bit application so keep in mind that RAM is limited to 3GB.

They are working toward a 64bit version but I wouldn't expect to see that until at least the next major release (v9).

The workaround to memory limitation is generally divide and conquer by cutting your project into smaller pieces.

 

...and as a bonus for reading through all that, TechSmith does provide some free music for use with creating videos.

The music is available in several lengths (intro, medium and long) in zipped files: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia-library-media-music-tracks.html

Note that although the file extension may appear otherwise the files are just zip files containing the music.

[robcat2075]

Does anything happen to the Techsmith codec? Do old quicktimes done in Techsmith no longer work?

[Rodney]

The produced files (resulting products) aren't effected.

The change only relates to the recorded data within Camtasia.

 

Note: This appears to be one of several updates Techsmith is planning to bridge the gap between PC and Mac compatibility.

Currently -Project Files- are not transferrable between PC/Mac but as of this release the recording sessions are.

A future update should see the Project Files themselves move to cross platform compatibility but I suspect this will require a fairly major update to the Project File formatting.

As long as the recorded data is the same... at least the ingested data can be shared.

 

This should remind us of how nice it is that A:M's file format is the same on both platforms.