Choppy Preview

Camtasia's timeline currently doesn't support 60 fps footage.

Actually, it convert's any footage placed on it to 30fps. 1/2 the frames ore discarded.That conversion seemed to create a lot of problems in Camtasia 8 but not so much In Camtasia 9.

Have you updated your NVidia drivers lately?I don't really think that's it but it's worth a try.
 
I don't record  gameplay normally but I do so for testing purposes.  I have some Shadow Play footage that's captured at about 2 1/2 times the quality of yours.


I'm running the latest version of Camtasia 9.1.2 and the playback is surprisingly smooth. There's a few callouts and and other elements thrown in to slow it down. But it plays through them smoothly as well.

Dell Computer SPECS.

XPS 8700

Windows 10, 64-bit, English EA - -

 4th Generation Intel Core i7-4770 processor (8M Cache, up to 3.9 GHz)

16GB RAM Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz - 4 DIMMs EA - -

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 1.5GB GDDR5 EA - -    Supporting   4 Displays

2TB Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA Hybrid Drive 6 .0 Gb/s   1 EACH –

2TB Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive 6 .0 Gb/s    1 EACH –

1TB Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive 6 .0 Gb/s    1 EACH

 Regards,Joe
 
You may want to contact tech support. Bring up this post and my smooth playback. I can also playback 60fps footage from my DSLR smoothly. But I probably wouldn't edit it in Camtasia, I have Premier Pro which doesn't discard 1/2 the frames.
 

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I have a business laptop, plus my own i7 machine similar to the original poster, and I too experience severe lag while previewing/editing and working in the timeline on both machines.  My footage is mostly screen-recordings using Camtasia's 30 FPS defaults, with a few callouts - usually the built-in sketch motion ones.  I am surprised more people didn't chime in to this thread, because my entire team is struggling with choppy timeline for a while now.  I am not exactly sure when the choppiness started, but it wasn't always like this.

per other responses on this forum, try this ...

on menu ... edit/preferences/advanced, under hardware acceleration, try software only mode

does that work?

I'm experiencing the exact problem, I tried all of the suggested solutions.

i7-6700K 4.0 GHz with 32.0 GB of RAM,  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card.  I'm struggling with a choppy timeline.