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Premiere Pro and Camtasia
I may be going about this all wrong, but here’s how I’m approaching my project:
I have footage shot on an HVX200 (1920 x1080, 30fps). The footage is of a software install in an office setting, in which the person is installing software (over the shoulder shots) and connecting USB and Serial port hardware. I need to mix this with Camtasia screen captures (Camtasia Studio 6) using the office footage as establishing shots and intercutting “real” footage with Camtasia screen captures.
I have captured the Camtasia software segments at 1280 x 960, the current settings on my desktop machine. I notice that with my graphics card that I can go to a max of 1600 x 1200. When I output my Camtasia grabs to higher than the capture setting, needless to say, everything gets soft. No surprise.
So what’s the best workflow to make the Camtasia footage work with the 1080 footage in Premiere, or do I have to bring everything into After Effects, and size stuff there accordingly? I’m much more experienced with AE (CS4) than Premiere (CS4), or Camtasia (but Camtasia’s pretty simple). I’m trying to avoid losing a gen by having to output from Premiere to AE, but ultimately everything is going to 640 x 360 (as Flash and QT) for the web.
Thanks for your help.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
3 Replies
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We do this kind of thing in our studio — I don’t have the numbers (exact pixel dimensions, bit rate etc) handy, but here’s our workflow.
We export our Camtasia screen captures at the highest resolution and largest size, to an H264 Quicktime format. We then bring that H264 into Premiere, and build a training video mixing the screen capture with live teacher shots. Invariably the Camtasia H264 gets resized down in Premiere to our final training video dimensions. Premiere does the downsizing in most instances. For higher quality, Photoshop can do it. (Yes — Photoshop, the “extended” version).
Occasionally we need to add an animation or effect, which we do in After Effects. Depending on the item — we may create the effect in AE with transparency and then overlay it in Premiere. Or we will copy/paste from Premiere timeline into AE comp, only the small portion where the effect is needed, then import via dynamic link or render and import. Aside from that, why go thru AE??
Tam
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That’s just the answer I was looking for, Tam. I knew there had to be a way other than through AE (although with Dynamic Link I suppose it would be rather painless). AE was not made to be an NLE!
While I was waiting for an answer I discovered that I could output QT uncompressed at 1920 x 1080, and it holds up pretty well in Premiere (considering that it originated at 1280 x 960). The only things I’ll be doing now in AE will be the endslate and whatever other animations I will need for the project.
You’re right about PS Extended – it has some really amazing video capabilities, few of which I have tapped at this point. I just bought the Lynda CS4 PS tutorials, though, so I’ll be chewing through those when I have the time. Thanks again.
Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com -
A couple of things worth noting (I’m wary about making generalizations ’cause someone is going to pounce on me and prove I’m technically wrong, but here are some things to mention that have worked for us):
We also started out exporting from Camtasia as uncompressed, for the obvious reason of keeping highest quality. But after some experimentation, we found that going to H264 was just as good, from a practical point of view — meaning, yes there will be some loss of quality thru the compression, but it was not noticeable. Another possible way to go: PhotoJPG at 85 quality. The point here is to avoid those humongous uncompressed files which are hell to play back and costly to archive…
If your ultimate usage is the web, why would you be upsizing? Why are you not creating a Premier Project with your sequence dimensions equal to your final output?
Another thing which was discovered by Stanley, a senior editor in our studio, was that apparently the resizing algorithm in Photoshop works differently from — and better than — Premiere. So if sharpness is critical, that’s when you may want to go the Photoshop route. Down side is that it adds a step to your workflow.
Tam
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