Nov 17 2008
Camtasia 6 Is Disappointing Users
Should you upgrade now or wait for Camtasia 7?
The news from early Camtasia 6 adopters is not encouraging.
Version 6 has been out for about a week, and already TechSmith is pushing a maintenance release, v 6.0.1, to deal with problems in recording and editing. While it is great that TechSmith is so quick to respond to user feedback, it is unfortunate that they didn’t catch these problems before release. This is a fairly pricey purchase, after all.
The complaints so far:
- Frequent crashes
- No FLV output
- Audio problems
- S-L-O-W performance
The lack of FLV is, all by itself, almost enough to make me skip this upgrade. I have read TechSmith’s reasoning, and Adobe’s statement that FLV has gone as far as it is likely to go – but I am not in a hurry to switch to MP4.
Camtasia 5.1 did most things right. Yes, there is room to improve the audio recording and editing and yes, the promise of High Definition is enticing. But neither seems worth the trouble reported on the TechSmith forums. Especially since upgrading v5 audio to v6 is one of the problem areas – and, astonishingly, TechSmith’s solution is to recommend Audacity.
The upgrade from v3 to v4 was underwhelming, both in terms of features and stability. Camtasia 5 was the true successor to v3. Early reports – and, in fairness, these are really very, very preliminary reports – hint at a similar situation with v 6.
Since I am more or less content with Camtasia 5.1, rather than leap into the fray with a $150 upgrade, I’ll be sitting on the sidelines a little longer, waiting for more encouraging news.
If you are using Camtasia 6, I’d like to hear your impressions in the Comments.
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14 responses so far
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I do not use Techsmith’s Camtasia anymore. It’s still one of the best product in the market but they don’t bring much new innovations and it’s still too expensive.
Yes, I have to agree. I have the Camtasia 6 and I can’t do anything with it. Basically every time I try to edit it crashes, so at this point it is completely useless. I do like using the MP4 feature because I can render my video to any size, whereas in version 5 I am limited to 400px for MP4. The quality of MP4 is great and the file size are much smaller than FLV, however not being able to edit is the biggest issue. I am really disappointed because now I have to uninstall this version and go back to version 5 just to edit my videos and have a program that actually works. The only way I can render is with the Batch Render, but because of the terrible audio, I don’t want to batch render.
@Chris – There is nothing more frustrating than upgrading to a new version of Camtasia and then having it crash when you want to produce a screeencast. I went through that during the early days of v4. And then went through the Chipmunk soundtrack problems later. I love Camtasia and Snagit. I just don’t understand how they can miss some of these early bugs. Anyway, I now wait for a good reason to upgrade and take full advantage of the trial period before uninstalling a previous version of Camtasia.
Dany
@ Vidlock – I don’t upgrade quickly anymore, either. The price of upgrades is pretty steep. Considering everything you get in Camtasia, I don’t think the price is unreasonable. But it is high enough to make me think twice about what new features I really need. I might just skip v6 altogether and go for v7 next year (unless I absolutely need high definition before then).
Dany
yeah, i upgraded, and it worked fine for about 1 day. I honestly didn’t see it coming. the next day (and in the mean time i was doing some pc maintenance) ALL audio features fail on me…. ok fine…i wasn’t planing on using audio anytime soon anyway….then the next day video functionality seizes to comply with my commands, so im thinking i did something during the mods of my pc…fine….i spent 1 hr restoring my pc, then the first thing i install is CAM 6 and when i try to click anything ti crashes!!!! i then have to spend 4 more hrs re-modding my pc knowing i did nothing wrong!!!! but while it was working, the video quality was superb….even though the frame rate was too slow because my graphics card is bogus.
I upgraded two weeks ago. I use C6 everyday and I have had no problems. Could it be because I still use XP Pro? My upgrade went very smooth without errors. All my C5.1 project files perform very well. I’m surprised to hear about your difficulties. I will watch C6 more closely and repost if trouble surfaces. Happy New Year!
Thanks, Greg, I look forward to hearing more. I really love Camtasia, and I want to love Camtasia 6. Perhaps it is just matter of time – or of finding another solution for creating FLVs until I am in a position to really dump the format.
Dany
Hi Dany. Inspired in part by your post before Christmas I’ve been digging into the adoption rate of the mp4-enabled Flash player. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to switch to mp4 if too many users in the target site can’t see the mp4 content…
Having surveyed three established sites I’m not convinced that even 90% of the general web userbase has an mp4-enabled player, I’ve asked the question at techsmith to get some real-world data:
http://forums.techsmith.com/showthread.php?t=9942
(and my data is shown here: http://blog.procasts.co.uk/2009/01/less-than-90-adoption-of-mp4-compatible-flash-910/ )
Given that CT6 doesn’t support FLV video (as supported by >99% of real-world Flash installs) I think it is important to realise that perhaps 1 in 10 viewers at a site won’t see mp4 content
With this in mind I’ve written an easy tutorial showing how the free ffmpeg can be used to convert CamTasia 6′s mp4 output into flv, along with a description of all the trickier flags for fine tuning:
http://blog.procasts.co.uk/2008/12/convert-camtasia-6-mp4-to-flv-using-ffmpeg/
Conversion of a 3 minute graphics-rich mp4 video takes 3 minutes on my 2.4GHz WinXP machine and the process is very simple.
Ian.
I’ve been editing a 1-hour video for 2 days! That about says enough. If Camtasia 6 wasn’t so slow, I would have finished in a few hours.
Such a good program, but so annoying at the same time.
Dan
http://www.themodernman.com/what_women_want.html
I was not happy with Camtasia 6- while it is better than camstudio I think they have missed the mark on targeting a definate purpose and a definable audience for the end result. Is it going to be a presentation tool? Is it going to be a webcast tool? With all of the features that allow us to record screen action, edit media and audio, provide test questions or polling (SCORM) and output to so many formats.. it begs the question? What is it for?
I love the expandable file structure in Theatre and hated that they no longer allowed FLV.
With SWF and FLV so dominant and prevelant why skip the obvious? The creative user might want to incorporate the power of this tool into one major purpose- Wouldn’t it be great if we could create segments in swf format and import them to Camtasia, rather than rendering clunky AVI files to import?
Nothing comes close to this functionality in CT 6.
Everything is here but the ability to create custom elements and include them as part of the final output.
We’ve been struggling to work with the new (6.0.2) Camtasia studio. It crashes with annoying regularity when editing and so far on four different occasions has failed to properly record (or save) a presentation. At the end of the presentation, we save from the preview window only to be left with a .camrec file that Studio can’t open, or opens but can’t work with and no temp files. Extremely frustrating, and very disappointing. I would recommend staying on your current version, this one is not yet ready for prime time…
Using the Trial…I was smart enough to try it first twice. It Crashes every 10 minutes. I then have to recover and splice the files together. A real pain in the ass. I would buy it if worked looking for another solutions before the trial runs out. Oh yeah and I am still on XP Pro.
I upgraded from Camtasia 4 to 6 and I have to say it has been an unmitigated disaster. I had the video section of a long important recording come out blank. I tried to split off the audio from this .camrec file, that also crashed. I am definitely not a happy camper.
Man, I have camtasia 6.0.3 it has so many bugs, its unbelievable.
PPT plugin is totally unusable. addin crashes, does not record sound, editing after does not play
crashes on renerings, will not start, have to kill process tree sometimes up to 5 times.
play button in edit mode will not play sound unless treid multiple times.
Honestly, if you get it to work, it works great, but so many bugs in one piece of software, I have never encountered in 20 years. Especially at $300 a pop.