Using Camtasia 6.0 with Articulate Presenter

[RichardCampbell]

Anyone had success yet with Camtasia 6 output in Articulate products? I am in contact with the development team at Techsmith and will pass along any requests to them.

[brianosmi]

Richard, thanks for keeping us in the loop. I have steered away, at least for now, from upgrading to v6 because of this issue.

[GerryWaz]

Aww, foobar . . . I already have my upgrade in . . . .

[brianosmi]

Originally Posted by GerryWaz

Aww, foobar . . . I already have my upgrade in . . . .

The one good thing that I've read is that you can have both versions installed side by side, so no need to uninstall v5 while you test v6.

[GerryWaz]

Thanks, Brian! Will do until something better comes along . . .

[mikemc]

Richard, I worked with support on this issue, and we were able to install and play SWF videos in Engage after we went through the save process on CS6, selected custom animation, chose SWF/FLV, then selected Legacy SWF output from the pre-set options.
Hope this helps.

[RichardCampbell]

The following is a post from Brooks Andrus - Lead Flash Developer on why flv output is discontinued in Camtasia Version 6:


JW FLV Player supports the playback of MP4.

2008-11-19_0131

If you're using an older version of the Adobe Flash media components a workaround is to change the file extension of the video from ".mp4" to ".flv".

This is because Flash Player doesn't care what the extension is, but the components are hard coded to only accept ".flv" as the extension. Change the file name and ensure users have at least Flash Player 9.0.115.

The new versions of CS4 ship with components that don't have these issues.

It's also useful to note that YouTube transcodes whatever you upload (regardless of if its flv, mov, avi, mp4, etc.) and one of the supported playback formats YouTube encodes to (watch in high quality) is MPEG4-AVC (h.264).

Granted there's a bit of pain here, but there's been a tectonic shift here and everything is heading in this direction.
__________________
Brooks Andrus
Senior Flash Developer
TechSmith Corporation

[daveperso]

Right, I had already played with this. I changed the mp4 tag from Camtasia 6 to flv and then inserted into Articulate Player '09 and it plays BUT there is a black screen at the end which I wasn't able to get rid of.

However, I have not been having any problems inserting SWF from Camtasia 6 as per the recommended practices in this article. If you choose the legacy template, then your movie will automatically be created in SWF format and you are also free to choose the framerate of your movie (I generally go for 30 fps). So if you want to incorporate Camtasia into Articulate, use SWFs from the Legacy Template.

Interestingly enough, Apple dropped FLV as one of their export options in Quicktime Pro earlier this year.

Regards

[brianosmi]

Originally Posted by daveperso

If you choose the legacy template, then your movie will automatically be created in SWF format and you are also free to choose the framerate of your movie (I generally go for 30 fps).

Not saying anything negative towards all of the suggestions in this thread about using the legacy template and publishing to .swf... I used to do this all of the time and it worked well.

The problem that I ran into is that when you start adding some of the nice effects offered by Camtasia, such as the spotlight effect, the size of those .swf files really balloon out of control. Just adding one effect to a 45 second video increased the size of my published .swf file by about 3 mb!!

The reason for this is that .swf files are better suited to low-motion, low key frame video and when you start adding effects like the one mentioned above it causes more keyframes to be added to the .swf and subsequently bloats the file size.

FLV (and mp4), on the other hand, is designed for high motion video. I found that with Camtasia v5 I was able to add a spotlight effect and publish to FLV with almost no difference in file size when compared to the same FLV with no effect. Very nice.

Bottom line, I'm going to continue to use both .swf and FLV (when needed) in my courses, but the sooner we can get support for the mp4 format the better. It just makes a much better workflow when I can export from Camtasia using a format I can import into Articulate.

[daveperso]

Brian, I have to agree. The legacy template is fine for basic screen captures. I personally will not be upgrading from Camtasia 5 to 6 so that I can keep the FLV importing in Articulate.