Monday, November 20, 2006

Camtasia Studio 4 - Happy, but confused!?

After my previous post about 'How to get an mp3 out of a camtasia screencast' I bought the new version 4 of Camtasia Studio. It offers the possibility to create mp3 and iPod Video files on the fly while creating for example a flash based screencast. Great, it would make things quite a lot easier. Just take a look at the window that will appear once I decided to use 'Recommend my production settings'.



This seems to do exactly what I want. But what does the option 'high', 'low', and 'medium' associated with 'Create iPod file' mean? Bandwidth, file size, or compression rate. Well I just did try it out. I used all three settings. Here is what happened to me:
  1. Setting 'Low': file size of iPod video: 12.2 MB
  2. Setting 'Medium': file size of iPod video: 12.2 MB
  3. Setting 'High': file size of iPod video: 12.2 MB.

It does not change a thing. This is especially confusing, since the original avi file was just 5 MB in size. The resulting iPod video is more than twice as large. I am confused!

The resulting flash presentation with download options for the iPod and the mp3 file looks really good. Just the displayed size of the file is disturbing. Now how to work around it and still keep the nice html file with download options?

Here is my very crude work-around. There must be a better way!

  1. First create the files using the settings above.
  2. Reproduce the iPod file using 'Custom production settings'. Choose only iPod/iTunes. Here you have the option to set bandwidth to 'Low'.
  3. The resulting iPod file is now only 1.3 MB in size! It sounds and looks great.
  4. Replace the original monster file with this new one.
  5. Make sure the new file has the same name as the monster file.
  6. Open the html-file and look for the string with the file size of the monster file. Replace it with the size of the new iPod file.
  7. Done!

I hope there is a better solution somewhere in the documentation, but it all looked so easy so I just went ahead. I must have erred somewhere. I am still confused and looking for a solution. If I can find it, I will post it here.

Ulrich

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posted by Ulrich at 17:53

1 Comments:

Blogger Ulrich said...

I did contact support about this problem. It seems I did not do anything the wrong way, it is a glitch in an otherwise very helpful software.
Here is a quote from the response I got from support:
"This is a known issue when producing SWF/FLV with additional outputs to iPod. The only workaround available is to produce these two files separate. Development is working on fixing the issue for a future release."
Well I hope the future release will come soon. It sure will safe a lot of time and make a great and otherwise easy to use application even better.

Ulrich

18:31  

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