Camstudio Screen Capture in Adobe Premiere CS5.5

[Chris Tompkins]

If you have the original Camtasia capture files (not avi’s but proprietary) You can export from the Camtasia project to QT – FYI.

But, It helps to record the same screen size as your project. Small text and details will take a hit when going to video.

What are your Sequence settings?
What are you exporting to?

You have screen captures and video edited together and are now exporting a finished master?

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Dominic,

What were the original screen cap settings, and what preset did you use in Premiere? I do tutorials with Camtasia and capture as 1024×768 at 15fps, then in Premiere I create a CUSTOM sequence to match. Quality remains the same when editing.

When exporting out of Premiere, do NOT use a “video” preset – video codecs cannot maintain the quality of a computer screen grab, especially NTSC! You may need to use something like “Quicktime – Animation” codec to maintain the quality when moving to FCP, though this may produce large files, but in the end you will be compressing for distribution (I use .wmv for final delivery on PC side, and a 3.5-hour tutorial I did is only 600mb).

Hope this helps

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Tim Kolb]

Agreed.

You need to capture a frame (screen) size that you will stick with through the edit, and then export to that same framesize.

Computer interfaces are simply not designed to be scaled, and one-pixel thick text will quite predictably fall apart when you try to change the frame size between capture and final output.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Dominic Koponen]

Hi Chris,

I am actually using camstudio, I have not been able to use camtasia and unfortunately camstudio only provides .avi files.

My original sequence I used was the XD Cam EX but it wasn’t looking to great when I exported. I then saw tutorials that said to change my sequence to the following settings:

Editing Mode: Custom
Timebase: 29.97 fps
Frame Size: 1920X1080
Pixel Aspect: Square
Fields: None (Progressive)
Display Format: 30 fps Drop-Frame Timecode

Preview File Format: I-Frame Only MPEG
Codec: MPEG I-Frame
Size: 1920X1080
Maximum Bit Depth: Yes
Maximum Render Quality: Yes

Yes I capture the video from our computer while shooting video of the person explaining what is going on and edited them together. My Original capture footage is 1920X1080 as well.

[Dominic Koponen]

Hello Jeff!

My original cap Settings were 1920X1080, 8fps (I know terrible, but the computer was bugging out and it looks okay). The original video is very crisp and looks amazing (besides the frame rate). My sequence in premiere is set up right now as:

Editing Mode: Custom
Timebase: 29.97 fps
Frame Size: 1920X1080
Pixel Aspect: Square
Fields: None (Progressive)
Display Format: 30 fps Drop-Frame Timecode

Preview File Format: I-Frame Only MPEG
Codec: MPEG I-Frame
Size: 1920X1080
Maximum Bit Depth: Yes
Maximum Render Quality: Yes

I feel like maybe it may be an export error I am making. I will definitely try Quicktime – Animation codec and stay away from NTSC haha especially since output will be to the web not devices. I am on a mac so I cannot export as a WMV. Our final outlet will be YouTube.

Thank You!