Camtasia and Vegas 7

cutz wrote on 4/5/2008, 7:18 AM

I am producing some video lessons out of my computer screen. To record the screen I used Camtasia Studio 4. Rendered the video files as AVI or Quicktime. The quality of these video clips are very good. However, when edited in Vegas 7 and rendered as MPGS I lose a lot of the quality. The final video clip is used in Flash CS3 becuase these video files are used on a CD-ROM not a DVD.

Does anyone know why rendering in Vegas loses a lot of quality?
What should I do to keep the quality Camtasia's video files and get ot Flash without much loss?

Thanks for your help

Comments

Terje wrote on 4/5/2008, 7:53 AM

I have had the most success with Camtasia with the following work-flow (when I am going to Flash)

1/ Capture and do stuff in Camtasia, render as uncompressed or very low compressed avi and move into Vegas

2/ Edit in Vegas and render back out as the same codec used from Camtasia

3/ Import into Camtasia and export as Flash

As long as Vegas doesn't do flash, this seems to have given me the highest quality renders. Remember to use the same frame-rate in Vegas and Camtasia, Camtasia likes to use 15 fps and similar. The Vegas project should use the same rate and the Vegas render should too.

Kennymusicman wrote on 4/5/2008, 8:54 AM

Check your field order too - make sure it's progressive

Marco. wrote on 4/5/2008, 9:50 AM

I suggest using the Techsmith ScreenCap codec offered by Camtasia to export out of Camtasia, as edit format in Vegas and as export format out of Vegas. If the GOPs causing trouble in Vegas - select a keyframe intervall of 1 anytime you use Techsmith codec. This works perfect here.

Marco

johnmeyer wrote on 4/5/2008, 11:42 AM

There sure have been lots of reports in this forum lately of people having severe quality degradation when rendering to MPEG-2. Since I am 99% certain that Vegas is capable of high-quality MPEG-2 renders that will be degraded only slightly from the original (small enough differences that you have to look very closely to see them), I come to the conclusion that there must be something similar in all the situations that is, at the same time, different from the "normal" rendering that most of us do.

I would sure like to have a chance to see a short (5-10 second) clip of the original material, along with the MPEG-2 that results from rendering that original. The VEG file would also be needed.

I suspect that there is something going on with what project properties. I just had to complete a render yesterday from a low-res, progressive MPEG-1 file (basically, a VCD, although it wasn't packaged that way). It did indeed take quite a bit of fiddling to get the final MPEG-2 to look good, and in fact, my first attempt resulted in an MPEG-2 of very fuzzy quality. However, in the end, I got extremely good results that were, as described above, very difficult to distinguish from the original when placed back into Vegas and then "A/B'd" back and forth. While I don't have my source material on-line anymore, I just opened the VEG, and here are the project properties:

It is important to get the field order progressive, if your source is progressive, which I assume it is with Camtasia. Rendering quality should be set to Best, because you are probably changing resolution, and are certainly changing the field structure. Finally, there has been much written about Deinterlace Method. I have not experimented to confirm whether this makes any difference, but others swear by this, so pay attention to it.

Also, make sure that the Render As settings match these project settings.

farss wrote on 4/5/2008, 3:40 PM

I suspect Cutz's problem could be simply the difference in resolution.
We've got two Sony 1024 scan converters and time after time users complain about how bad their PPTs look after going through them and out as composite video to a projector, sigh.

Bob.