Review Camtasia 6: The Good, Bad and The Ugly

I upgraded to Camtasia 6 at the weekend (from v4) mostly to import and edit .MOV files. These are created by my faithful Canon Powershot when I shot videos. Sony makes AVIs. The other reason was to do more heavy lifting with Camtasia. I have tons on material on the hard-disk and want to get these into screencasts. So, what the verdict?

Review Camtasia 6

Price – $149 not cheap but not as expensive as Adobe Premiere.

Key features

Import and edit MOV files
Independent audio edits (saves me doing audio in Audacity)
3D tilt (can’t find where to do this, yet) and oodles of
Special effects

The good – What I liked

The user interface is nice, no nutty changes a Ia Microsoft Office and ribbon bars

Presets for blog, YouTube etc means it will help you produce files that best suit these formats. For simple videos, this is fine. You can do your own monkeying around as well, e.g. change frame rates.

the bad – What I don’t like

Audio enhancements are hit and miss. Sometimes makes the voice lovely and rich (hey, why not!) other times I sound like I’m under-water.

Number of un-dos seems limited. I love to un-do.

the ugly – real Problems

Freezes with files over 4 MB. These are (for me) small files, so I need to reboot all the time. Big problem. (What memory do I have? 80 GB of hard disk and 2 GB of RAM – thought that would be ok.) This is a killer. Files more than 3MB cause Camtasia to freeze. What this means is that when I try to make an AVI, MP4 or MOV for YouTube, the thing locks, usually at 19-25%. Close all apps, re-boot and try again. No joy.

Smartfocus won’t start – Camtasia thinks I’m using an older version, e.g. v5, and so won’t start it. I’m on 6. Can’t get it to work. See the error message.

MOVs won’t import – this is a horror! According to the site ‘Large MOV files not importing into Camtasia. Camtasia will crash or give a no codec message upon importing. This is a known issue that will be fixed in a future release. As a workaround, try creating smaller MOV files from other programs when bringing them into Camtasia.’ I’ve done this and still no luck. Off to contact Tech Support.

MP4s won’t import – No Codec available error message. Contact Tech Support.

FWIW I download all the codes I can find on the site, re-boot and… no joy.

What to do next?

Not sure. Have downloaded all the codecs I can find, re-booted the pc, cleared the cache, closed all apps and sent some emails to Techsmith. Now, I’m waiting…