Camtasia AVIs not playing in AE

[Sahadeo Bates]

Did you Render it in AE?

[Simon Roughan]

Hmmmm.
I am using the standard TechSmith Screen Capture codec. There’s not a huge selection of codecs to use in Camtasia. It used to work fine in AE 6.5.

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

All of my tutorials use the techsmith screen capture codec. It should work fine in AE. However, it is designed for screen captures with low motion – not actual live footage – or high motion video – and performs pretty poorly in those situations.

What does your footage contain?

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

[Aharon Rabinowitz] “All of my tutorials use the techsmith screen capture codec.”

Meant to say, The codec is used in AE – not the final video, of course. All of my screen caps are done through camtasia, and I’ve never had a problem with playback in AE so long as it was a capture of a computer interface. Live-action stuff performed terribly.

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

[Simon Roughan]

Hi Aaron (Ive learned heaps from your Tuts, thanks…) and Dave,
a short explanation of what Im doing with this. We produce a magazine show for a big international corporation (who shall remain nameless) and in that magazine show is a segment on what their web page is doing. I get a text for the segment, and then surf around their website relevant to the text that will spoken. I capture this whole process with camtasia, then import the files into after effects. There they get a bit of fine tuning (cutting the crap out etc)and properly timed with the text. Then I drop the 1280×1024 comp into a normal PAL comp and fly a cmera around it to highlight the relevant points. Render out. Or in theory anyway.
So sometimes there are flash movies playing, sometimes pop-up windows, sometimes animations, page scrolling etc, but nothing too radical, I would of thought. But now since I have CS3, I have these problems. The workaround I have is to throw the AVIs into Squeeze, and make progressive QTimes in Animation codec. This works fine, but somewhat time consuming. I suppose I could make the AVIs with the lossless codec, but the files are so bloody huge… I dont like the look of the other codecs; Cinepak, Indeo, DivX etc.
So summing up, my captures are no more complicated than a AE tutorial. Tech Smith codec is set at highest quality, 25 fps. What can I do?
Thanks in advance
Simon

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

Not that it should kill you but you are capturing larger than their largest recommended size (1024×768).

Would you consider capturing at 15 FPS? I always capture at 15. Again, it shouldn’t be too big a deal at 25, but you never know.

I know it;s freezing when it plays, but will it render out of AE OK? Try that and let me know.

Another option is to export from Camtasia using their quicktime codec called Enshapren. It;s not quite as good, but it’s much better than most of the other compressed codecs for situations like this – screen captures I mean. The default level of quality has banding on gradated areas, but you can bump the quality up a bunch at the cost of filesize.

An example of a tutorial I did using the Ensharpen Codec instead of the camtasia one is this:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/workflow_4/video.php

If you look carefully, you can see banding in blue gradated bar at the top, and also in a few places in the comp window where 1 color fades to another. The quicktimes in this scenario were about 2x the filesize of the techsmith catpture codec.

You can also convert the video to a PNG sequence to use as a proxy. The PNG sequences are much MUCH larger in file size than Camtasia AVI’s, but they work, and are lossless. Don’t forget to export a separate audio file to match.

Best,

Aharon

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

[Simon Roughan]

Thanks Aharon. I havnt tried rendering the files, cause like I explained, I need to do some basic editing with the file, which is impossible like it is. But will try the ensharpen codec out.
Thanks again for yout time and help.

[Jon Draper]

Did you ever find a nice work around for the camtasia after effects problem?

Having the exact same thing….

Not even found a QT codec conversion which works yet..

Trying Deinterlaced QT Animtion codec as I type….

[Bipin Anand]

Hello People!!

I had the same problem… Dave LaRonde explained a little about the key frames and how after effects needs info for ever frame.. I came across an option from tools –> options –> video tab –> click ‘video compression –> and then un-check ‘key frame every’.

I think this might get rid of the fact that the video is recorded without info for every frame…

It works for me! I had the same problem before, and now no more!

Bipin Anand
touchrainbow.com