Getting crisp, clear screen video isn’t as hard as you may think and in this tutorial
I’ll show you how to do it.
To start, it’s important to understand one key thing about screen video, it doesn’t
scale well.
Scaling is stretching or shrinking a screen recording to display it at a size different
than the original recording size This causes the screen video to quickly lose
quality, and appear blurry or distorted.
Before we dive in too far, let’s cover three key things you’ll need to know to get crisp,
clear video.
Recording dimensions are the size of your recording.
If you record full screen, this is usually the same as the resolution of your monitor.
Project dimensions are the size of your canvas, or the area in which you build your video
Production settings are the options you choose when producing your video, including the size
of your video.
The easiest way to get crisp, clear screen video is to match all three of these.
To do this in Camtasia, first record your screen.
Then, make sure the screen recording is displayed at its full resolution, or 100% scale.
If it isn’t, change it to 100%.
At this point, you’ll need to set your project dimensions to match your recording dimensions.
To do this, open project settings, and in the Canvas Dimensions menu, select “fit
to visible.”
This sets your project dimensions to match the dimensions of the clip on the canvas,
or in this case, your screen recording.
Lastly, produce your video as a local file, then choose custom production settings.
Custom production settings automatically use your project dimensions to produce your video.
If you’re on a Mac, choose “Export to MP4, then select “Options” and make sure
the “Dimensions” are set to “Current.”
This matches your productions settings to your current project dimensions.
This workflow that matches your recording dimensions, project dimensions and production
settings produces the the highest quality video from screen recordings.
That said, sometimes it's not possible or practical to record your screen at the size
you want to edit and produce.
For example, if you record a screen that is bigger or smaller than the size of the video
you want to create, or if your monitor doesn’t fit a standard 16:9 aspect ratio.
In situations like these, scaling the recording is unavoidable, however, you can use scaling
to your advantage and I’ll walk you through how we do just that.
For our tutorial videos, we record on a monitor that is 2560x1440px and the tutorials we create
are 1280x720px, which is exactly half the recording size.
We do this for a very specific reason.
Recording on a monitor that is larger than the project dimensions, allows us to zoom
in on the recording to show finer details.
We know that when we fit the recording to the video, it will be scaled to half its original
size and will have some quality loss.
Which is fine for us, because we spend most of our time zoomed in and focused on specific
parts of the user interface.
This is where we want to see the highest quality.
And to do that, we zoom to the recording’s original size, or 100% scale.
This is the highest quality you can get from screen video.
And when we need to show something on an adjacent part of the screen, we pan over to continue
showing at 100% scale.
To learn about zooming in Camtasia, check out the “Animations In-Depth” tutorial
on our webpage.
To summarize, the key to getting crisp, clear screen video, is displaying the recording
at its original size, or 100% scale.
It’s often easiest to do this is by matching your recording dimensions, project dimensions,
and production settings.
But since that’s not always possible, use scaling to your advantage by establishing
context with scaled screen video, then zooming in to 100% to show those details.
Well, that’s all for now.
Thanks for watching.