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Screen capture rendering strangely…
I am rendering Camtasia Studio 6 screen capture footage out of Sony Vegas 8 @ DV Widescreen. The footage is of my mouse clicking through a program, and it looks fine until I render it.
In the render, the mouse and all of the drop down menus and are represented as flat black boxes. I can’t figure out why the footage looks great on the timeline but WAY wrong in the render?
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3 Replies
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I do this sort of thing all the time (Camtasia > Vegas), but I’ve never seen that problem in a render (although I have seen it with odd video card overlay display gremlins). One thing to check: Change the Video Preview window to “Best (Full)” and make sure you are rendering at Best quality (you can set the Project Properties Full Resolution Render Quality to Best as well). Theoretically, what you see in the Preview window at that point should be identical to the output, at least before it hits the compression. Which raises a possibility: You are rendering out to DV25? What happens if you render out to MPEG-2 (for DVD) or MP4 (for the Internet – this is what I do)?
One oddity in your workflow (that I don’t think is related) is that you are capturing square pixel video at 720×480, right? This will get stretched in a widescreen project. Or are you capturing at 873×480 square pixel?
My workflow (just as a fer example) is 1280×720 square pixel capture and output to the same. Since there’s no pixel conversion going on, the quality is very good.
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I had set Camtasia up to capture full frames @ 30fps and fixed the frame to my working frame size of 720×480. Once I dropped it on the timeline I changed the pixel ratio to DV Widescreen. I tried rendering the vid as MPEG-2 and got the same thing.
It still blows my mind that this is only happening in the render?!?!
And why only black-out the drop down menus and mouse? I thought Camtasia just recorded pixel information.
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I’d switch to 873×480 capture resolution if you want to go out to widescreen DVD-Video disc. Not that I think it will solve your problem, but it will fix a distortion issue you are certainly getting.
But I’m baffled as to what could be going on. You are capturing in Camtasia and immediately saving to AVI using the TechSmith codec, right? That’s definitely the fastest workflow.
Just a test: Try rendering out to a lossless format, say AVI-Uncompressed or QuickTime-Animation codec. Render out to identical frame size/PAR (720×480 square or whatever). I have NO idea why this would work, but by changing those two variables (square pixel output and the codec) something magic might happen.
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