Donna Henry's List: Creative Suite 4

"Camtasia Studio 4 Tutorial: Understanding AVI, .CAMREC, and Third-Party Video Editing\n\nIn this tutorial we'll look at what AVI and CAMREC files are, how they work together, and how to plan for a video made with Camtasia Studio and for editing in other video editing programs like Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut, or any other video editor. We'll also go through how to change the dimensions of the screencast videos you produce, which is helpful when editing screencast video in other editors."

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"Folks,

I figured I would share some details of what worked for me!

First, recognize that Camtasia and Premier Pro have different capabilities and different user audiences. Premier Pro is for editing video with multiple audio/video tracks, transitions, titles etc. Target output is for any device, including DVD and Blu Ray presentations (i.e. standardized formats for TV). Premier Pro suites provide a huge array of support around these focus areas.

Camtasia is designed to capture and do minor edits to screen captures. It can provide a lot in the way of notations on screen, pan and zoom, hightlights, markers, etc, but fundamentally, it's designed to take in a video capture file, highlight certain aspects of that file and spit it back out for display on a computer.

My biggest problem is - Camtasia (due to it's audience focus) sucks when it comes to dealing with multiple video and audio files!

To resolve this issue, I spent a fair amount of time reviewing forums, testing codecs and transfers between Camtasia and Premier Pro. I won't claim that this is the very best approach, what I will say is that it worked for me on my system with Adobe Production Suite version CS4. I'm happy for folks to improve on this model, but would love to see you post back your results if you do improve on this work. There is another thread on Creative Cow that helped me work through some of these issues - see: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/882472.

Here's what I did:

Convert from Camtasia to a format Premier can work with:

Import screen capture asset into Camtasia editor
Produce Video from Editor with the following settings:

Custom Production Settings
AVI output
AVI Encoding Options


True Color
Video Compression - full frames (uncmpressed)
Frame rate - automatic (will end up at 15 fps)

Video size - based on recording - use the original
Author info - as required

This will create an uncompressed file that can be utilized properly in Premier