“screen capture” videos are damaged in premiere

[Harm Millaard]

Well, the damage has been done, but remove k-lite ASAP. It nearly always causes serious grief.

Use a good screen capture program that delivers not just a file (AVI) but uses the correct codec for editing in PP. You can rename an AVI to TXT, but that does not mean it will open in Notepad. An AVI file means exactly nothing, it’s about the codec used.

Harm Millaard

[Gian Lio]

any good screen capture program for premiere pro?

[Perry Cheng]

CamStudio comes to mind. There are others as well. However, like Ham said, what codec did it use? Can the “screen capture” program you have capture onto another format? such as mpeg? when you say it is bend, poor quality… what do you mean? If aspect ratio is wrong, it will appear bend. Poor quality perhaps related to capturing in a small size video, i.e. 320×240 and your ppro project is at 800×600, it will be very pixelated.

Best wish,
Perry

[Michael Kavanaugh]

I have been using Camsasia Studio without incident. I have also used the Camtasia editing tools to pre-edit and add some graphics then exporting as .AVI/.MOV files for final editing in Premiere CS3.
Hope this helps!
Mike

[Marcus Carey]

I have spent the entire day looking for an answer to this problem. I cannot find an answer to the basic question: Which screen capture program and/or codec works with Premiere Pro on a Windows machine?

Nothing I’ve done, or can find, or have read here seems to help me get to the bottom of the issue.

Does someone have this answer?

Thanks. Pulling out what little hair I have to spare.

[Dan Isaacs]

Premiere generally has problems with all temporally compressed formats. This includes codecs such as TechSmith’s.

Download the Lagarith lossless codec:
https://lags.leetcode.net

Download VirtualDub:
https://virtualdub.org

Assuming you are using Camtasia, I suggest capturing using the TechSmith codec as normal. However, after capturing is complete, open the .avi in VirtualDub and recompress it with the Lagarith codec. Premiere will handle the Lagarith file a lot better than the original.

Here’s a variation of this technique I often use when I want to do zooms on screen captured material (like close-ups of mouse clicks, etc.):

1.) Capture using the TechSmith codec
2.) Open the file in VirtualDub, go to Video / Filters and add a “Resize” filter. Set this to EXACTLY 200% (or even 300%, 400%) of the original size setting filter mode to “Nearest Neighbor” (this is much better for GUI elements and screen text).
3.) Save as a Lagarith .AVI
4.) Import the Lagarith file into After Effects, create a comp that matches you Premiere project settings (such as 720×480 0.9 PAR) and apply zooming and panning. This will which look much better than what Premiere can do if you add motion blur.

[Riki Babington]

Listen everyone, this will be the most important news you will hear about this. I found a solution that is so simple it hurts.

1. Open the avi file with quicktime

2. Then click File – Save

3. Save the file as a self-contained movie

This does not recompress the video, it just changed the container from avi to mov and the filesize should be the same.

Now you will be able to edit your camtasia files in Premiere with EASE!

Yes I do accept tips! :p

[Wes Mcclure]

The fact that this works screams to me that Premiere needs a bug fix.

FYI to save time ffmpeg can do this conversion, I’ll give this a spin on some of my work and let people know if I hit any roadblocks.

ffmpeg -i recording.avi -vcodec copy -acodec copy recording.mov