Camtasia still having some issues

I've setup a page here that will list the tutorial videos as I create them during the implementation of ecommerce for mojoPortal.

Here's a direct link to the first one:
Setting up The Solution and Projects

I'm still having trouble with Camtasia. I've tried a number of different audio configurations but after about a minute of capture the pitch of my voice seems to go up and the audio gets ahead of the video. I don't know if this is a bug, or  a secret limitation to the free trial version (which is supposed to be fully functional), or if there is still some configuration I need to make to get it to work correctly. Anyone with any advice or experience in solving this problem please let me know. I'm hesitant to purchase this product if I can't make it work easily. The quality of the video and audio output seems very good but timing is critical and not having it in sync is a major problem.

If it would just work I could crank out tutorials easily but if I have to do 5 takes of each one like this its not going to be very helpful. I'm a busy developer and can't afford to waste a bunch of time on these, it needs to be easy and it needs to just work as expected.

Update 7:18 pm EST I just tried an experiment changing the default format for the Camtasia Recorder to .avi instead of .camrec. I watched quite a bit of the result andit seemed to be staying i sync but I haven't watched the whole thing yet. I am about to go out for the evening so I'll check it later but here is the link for anyone who wants to watch it, it about 29 minutes long

Setting Up the Module Control and Pages

Hopefully this is better.

Update 2/27/2007
The above linked Flash movie stays in sync for about the first 20 minutes then the audio gets ahead of the video, so still having the problem. It seems somewhat iproved since it lot longer in sync before it goes out but its still not appealing to spend a lot of time making a tutorial only to find that it didn't produce what you wanted and there is no apparent way to get it to do what it should.

Comments

re: Camtasia still having some issues

Monday, February 26, 2007 10:46:09 AM
I've sent a message to Camtasia support folks and referenced this post and my tutorial so thought I would post also the details of my setup:

P4 3GHz
4 GB RAM
XP SP2 patched and up to date
M-Audio MobilePRE USB preamp
RODE NT1-A Microphone

The sync problem is not caused by exporting to Flash. The clips have the sync problem after capture and playback out of sync in Camtasia Studio. Camtasia just seems incapable of capturing a clip of screen and audio longer than 1 minute without getting the audio out of sync.

My expected use case is to capture the screen and audio at the same time. I don't doubt that better results can be obtained by overdubbing the sound but I don't have time for that.

re: Camtasia still having some issues

Monday, February 26, 2007 12:26:03 PM
Seems I'm not the only one having this problem, so far no sign of a solution, unless maybe I can get the previous version of Camtasia


http://forums.techsmith.com/showthread.php?t=4266

http://forums.techsmith.com/showthread.php?t=4442
 

re: Camtasia still having some issues

Monday, February 26, 2007 5:57:44 PM
I think I may have just found the solution to the problem. If you configure the Recorder to use .avi format instead of the default .camrec format it seems to stay in sync.

I'm converting a long tutorial to Flash now and should have it posted soon.

re: Camtasia still having some issues

Sunday, March 2, 2008 2:11:28 PM

Joe, that is correct. Using .avi over camrec will cure this issue until Adobe fixes this annoying flash render quality assurance issue.

Jerry

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