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;

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
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
- Avoid using file on a network drive
- Scale down very large image files before importing to Camtasia
- Avoid excessively edited timeline
- Avoid building huge timeline
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