Feature request: To be able to render a project while working on another

Hi all.

The following is long but worth the read. Can a software engineer at Techsmith please review, discuss with colleagues and post a comment? Thanks.

Can Camtasia 9 please allow a project to be rendered simultaneously while I'm working on another. A good idea would be to let the batch rendering feature spin off as a separate application that renders in the background while I continue to work in the main application. Also it would be good if the batch rendering can also allow me to render multiple projects in parallel.

I can presently do all of this with a 'hack' I came up with.

Camtasia 8.x won't allow multiple instances of itself to run simultaneously and while rendering I can't continue to work. The result is I have to working on a project, put it to render and then do something else. That's a problem for me. So to get around this I run multiple instances of Camtasia in a sandboxing application called Sandboxie. Sandboxie was designed to be used for safe web browsing without virtualization. It runs an application in a separate memory space and stores its files in a separate sandbox folder. You can however recover files from the sandbox and move them to other parts of the system. I use it to run multiple instances of Camtasia 8.3 at once, work on a project in one and batch render in another.

The nature of the work I do requires me to create multiple 15min videos so my workflow is as follows:

1. Launch Camtasia outside of Sandboxie
2. Create and edit Project 1
3. Save Project 1
4. Close Project 1
5. Run Camtasia in Sanboxie by right-clicking Camtasia short cut and choosing "Run Sandboxed" (you get this option when you install Sandboxie)
6. Camtasia now launches an instance in Sandboxie where I then launch a batch rendering of Project 1
7. While Project 1 is rendering in the instance of Camtasia running in Sandboxie I then create a new project in the instance of Camtasia running outside of Sandboxie
8. Continue working on Project 2

I've had no access to Camtasia 9 but I've heard that it's faster at rendering and that's good. But I'm sure that it still won't max out my CPU/GPU's abilities. Camtasia 8.x only uses 20%CPU and 30% GPU resources on my machine. I'm running an Intel i5-6600 and a low end GeForce GT 730 video card. Even if Camtasia 9 is better, if I were to upgrade to a GTX 1060/1070 I'm sure much of the GPU's resources would still remain idle. This prevents me from scaling my hardware and benefiting from it with Camtasia. This limit has caused me to consider moving to Adobe Cloud multiple times because it scales better with hardware. The only reason I stayed with Camtasia is because I created the above 'hack'.

Also with the registered version of Sandboxie I can create multiple sandboxes and therefore run multiple instances of Camtasia in Sanboxie; one instance in each sandbox. I can therefore render 2/3/4 projects simultaneously!

The procedure is as follows:

1. Launch Camtasia in Sandboxie Sandbox1
2. Initiate batch render of Project 1
3. Launch Camtasia in Sandboxie Sandbox2
4. Initiate batch render of Project 2
5. Launch Camtasia in Sandboxie Sandbox3
6. Initiate batch render of Project 3

With the above procedure I noticed that my lowend GT 730 GPU gets maxed out when 3 projects are rendering simultaneously and my CPU is pined at around 70%. Rendering in Sandboxie adds some overhead but from my benchmarks the above procedure reduces my rendering time by 60%! A 1hr batch render session of 3 projects only takes 24 mins!

With this 'trick' I can in theory scale my hardware and benefit. I'm able to pull it off with Camtasia/Sandboxie because Camtasia uses DirectX for GPU acceleration.

Recommendation:

• Have the Batch Rendering ability spawn off as a separate application from the main application. That way we can run a batch rendering operation while still working on another project.
• Within the batch rendering application allow us to configure how many jobs we want to render simultaneously so as we upgrade our systems benefit from it. With our workflows we can divide and actually conquer!
  
• OR allow us to run multiple instances of the batch rendering application so we can setup how many jobs we want to run simultaneously ourselves by running multiple instances of the application.
  

Thanks for reading the whole post.
Odin.