Here is my attempt to execute Camtasia’s workaround.

First, some details that you need to know:

  • My system: Windows XP w/ SP2, a Pentium M processor at 1.6Ghz, and 1GB of RAM
  • The picture sizes are 2048 x 1536 for landscape and 1536 x 2048 for portrait. These are very reasonable image sizes given the need to zoom in on portions of the picture and still maintain good resolution for a final movie that will be around 480 x 360.
  • My video is about four minutes long.

So, as recommended, I took my .camrec file and had it write an AVI using the “recommended” production settings on the wizard.

My system took 6 minutes to create the AVI and it was 143 megabytes. That’s 36mb per min, compared to about 1mb per min for the FLV on my 480×360 final video. In other words, this workaround is a massive memory hog.

The AVI played fine on my system, so I created a new .camrec in Camtasia in order to add the zooms/pans/callouts. I was able to pull the AVI into the Clip Bin and it appeared that I was able to drag it onto the timeline successfully.

That was where my success ended. When I tried to play sections of the video in the preview player, I got nothing. After a minute of searching around with the progress bar, I was able to get the audio to play.

But I never got any video or even a still image in the preview player. When I tried to zoom the first frame of the AVI, I couldn’t get an image to appear in the zoom-n-pan window. I even tried capturing an image of the video using Ctrl + F. This was also fruitless. It appeared to execute the procedure but no image would ever appear in the destination folder.