Using Camtasia 6.0 with Articulate Presenter

[dmcneill]

While I've reviewed the post "Using Camtasia with Articulate Presenter" (May 23, 2008) it was based and written on Camtasia 5.0. With the changes to Camtasia 6.0, I'm unable to determine how to save a screen shot file in the recommended screen dimensions of 920x400 so that it can be imported as a flash swf/flv Adobe Flash file to use in Articulate Presenter. Any suggested solutions to this would be most appreciated.

[SeattleSamIam]

That is a good question. Has anybody else used the new Camtasia yet? When I get time I will look at it but I don't see buying an upgrade for a while since we use Captivate for much of our screen movies.

[RichardCampbell]

This is a comment from dave o'rourke lead developer of Camtasia posted on their user=to-user board..

MP4 replaces FLV in CS6. It's true that we were focused on the FLV format in v5. At the time, FLV was the recommended way to do video in Flash. Then Adobe changed the game by announcing that they'd reached the limits of what the FLV container could do, and that they were adopting the stardards based MPEG-4 container instead. They also announced decoding support for H.264 video and AAC audio. You can read all about it here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/wh...on-web_20.html

The MP4 output in CS6 is our response to this change. The MP4 files produced by Camtasia Studio use H.264 video compression and AAC audio compression. This combination delivers high quality at reasonable file sizes across a wide spectrum of content. In short: small files, high quality, no guesswork, standards based container, ubiquitous playback. That's a winning combination in my book

[brianosmi]

Richard, thanks for the response on this, and the heads up. If this is true it definitely changes the game for shops that have adopted the FLV format as a development standard.

When I click the link you included in your post I get a 404 error.

[Rob47]

Originally Posted by SeattleSamIam

Has anybody else used the new Camtasia yet?

I am still testing it and here is where I am right now:

1. I understand some of the reason to change to MP4, but AP uses SWF and FLV.
2. If you try to open the SWF generated when you encode an MP4, it will not play. Thus, you cannot use CS6 for AP unless you embed it into an HTML page. Work-around would be embed a web object in AP, but an extra step that adds to development time.
3. Unless someone else comes up with an easier to use solution with the new CS6 I will not be upgrading - despite the more slick new interface...

V/R,

Rob

[brianosmi]

Just in case anyone is interested in viewing the post referenced by Richard above, here is the URL: kaourantin.net: What just happened to video on the web?

It really doesn't sound like there will be a huge impact in the end. Even though the post above is a fairly old article (over a year old), it seems that the ripple effect of this change may now just be hitting the mainstream. After reading the post, I echo Richard's comments from above:

The MP4 output in CS6 is our response to this change. The MP4 files produced by Camtasia Studio use H.264 video compression and AAC audio compression. This combination delivers high quality at reasonable file sizes across a wide spectrum of content. In short: small files, high quality, no guesswork, standards based container, ubiquitous playback. That's a winning combination in my book

[RichardCampbell]

Actually the comments in my earlier post are from Dave O'Rourke, who is the lead developer of Camtasia. I am a guest moderator of the Techsmith user-to-user board (screen name campbell79) and a beta tester for Camtasia. Ordinarily I would have been more attuned to this FLV issue , but I was too busy this summer with a Camtasia 5.1 project and did not buy Articulate Studio until most recently.

[SeattleSamIam]

Has anyone tried to convert the mp4 using Articulate's video encoder? I wonder what the output is like.

[brianosmi]

Originally Posted by SeattleSamIam

Has anyone tried to convert the mp4 using Articulate's video encoder? I wonder what the output is like.

I haven't tried it yet but plan to. I'm glad that AVE encodes mp4, but I might stick with AVI if I'm working with a tool like Camtasia. I would think that you would get a better quality FLV converting from AVI than from mp4, but I could be wrong.

[Rob47]

I use Adobe's tools for conversion of file formats, but I would be fine trying the MP4 with SWF, but if I click on the swf file the MP4 does not play on my side. has anyone had any luck with the MP4 / SWF file combo in AP?

Rob