Some tips on getting faster rendering performance with Camtasia 9

Choose hardware that works better for the rendering performance

Camtasia 9 has a set of system requirements which can be found here: https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia-system-requirements.html but if performance is your major concern, you usually don't want to get a machine that just meets the minimum requirements. Here is what I would get for a machine today:

• Get the latest generation of i7 CPU, 16 GB or more memory;
• Get a dedicated video card with at least 256 MB or more dedicated video memory;

An integrated graphic/video card would work, but a dedicated card would usually work better. Some machine may have more than one graphic cards, Camtasia picks up the default card for rendering work. However you may be able to pick which card to use in the control panel (something like this in the screenshot): 



Also dedicated video memory work better than shared video memory. You may run: dxdiag.exe then "save all information..." to find out how much of the dedicated video memory your video card uses:

• Get a SSD hard drive

A SSD drive has faster disk I/O and helps the performance in many ways during recording, editing and production process.

Avoid building less performed timeline

Camtasia 9 is a very powerful tool that can build very complex timeline, if we don't pay attention, we can easily run into performance issue. Here is a list of tips for timeline building process.

• Avoid very long recording

Stick with short and multiple recordings and avoid long recordings. Not only short, usually smaller files can be moved around easily, they are more performed on timeline as Camtasia would spend less time retrieving the data from a shorter and smaller file.

• Avoid using file on a network drive

When possible, copy the files you use to the primary local hard drive, this usually gives you a better performance.

• Scale down very large image files before importing to Camtasia

If you have image files that have very large dimensions and you use a lot of places on timeline as very small thumbnail sized image, consider scaling it down before using it in Camtasia, this is especially true if you have a lot of them. As Camtasia will scale it on the fly during rendering process and big image also consumes more memory and resources, this hurts the performance very quickly.

• Avoid excessively edited timeline

If you have hundreds of editing to remove "umms" and "ahhs" etc for a recording, consider flattening this (producing to a file) timeline, then bring it back for further editing (adding effects, callouts etc other stuff). An excessively edited timeline can quickly bring your resources and performance down and flattening the media in a pre-edit step can save your a lot of time for the real touch step.

• Avoid building huge timeline

Groups, effects, transitions, behaviors etc are some of the cool features Camtasia provides that can really make your video engaging. However they may also hurt the rendering performance if not used properly. For example, if you have nested groups, or multiple effects stacked on each other, or have dozens of tracks stack on each other, or any combination of above. Also if you have a timeline that uses a lot (eg: hundreds) of media files, clips, callouts, markers, captions, transitions, effects etc building objects, the performance can go down quickly for project loading, timeline editing and canvas previewing, as well as production. So you may consider flattening the timeline or even part of that's done with changing/editing and then bringing it back to timeline would sometimes help the performance dramatically.

Choose production preset that works best for you

Camtasia 9 bumped up some production settings that can affect the rendering performance. For example, by default instead of using "Automatic" frame rate in CS8, we use 30 in CS9; instead of using 50% video encoding quality, we use 60% now in CS9. For some project, setting this back to use "Automatic" and "50%" would render 50% faster with a lot smaller file size without too much difference in video quality. So you may play a bit and find a production preset that works the best for the type of video you produce.


 
Another tip is that we usually want to match this with editing dimensions. If they are different, an additional scaling process is involved for every frame runs through the encoder. So if you want to change the produced video size, changing it in editing dimensions would usually give you a better performance. 


 
Some advanced registry flags that you may use to tune up the rendering performance

Note: changing registry data incorrectly can break how Camtasia works and we may change or even remove those registry flags without any notice, so it is at your own risk following on this session.
 
Production rendering priority:
By default, Camtasia 9 use "1" here, which is THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL in table below. "1" uses roughtly 70% of your CPU power, so you still can use some other light weight applications or activities such as browsing a web and sending/receiving emails etc. There are other flags you may use in case you want Camtasia to use more or less of your machine's CPU power: 

THREAD_PRIORITY_LOWEST                   -2
THREAD_PRIORITY_BELOW_NORMAL    -1
THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL                    0
THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL     1
THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST                   2



Production renderer scheme:
By default, Camtasia uses "2" for this flag. Meaning it uses software renderer for frame composition. You may change this flag to "0" and the "CSRenderLibRenderer" flag (next one down below) to "1" (which is the default) to use GPU for frame rendering and composition.


CSRenerLibRenderer:
By default is "1", means GPU rendring for preview. "0" means software rendering for preview. Production can also use this flag to control which renderer to use for frame composition when the "ProductionRendererScheme" flag above is set to "0".


Hopefully, with tips above, you may get a better rendering performance with Camtasia 9. We are striving to make the rendering performance faster and love to hear your feedback on how we may improve it.

Thanks and have a great holiday season!

Kevin Liu