Camtasia is a wonderful screen capture and video editing tool but it has always had one big recurring problem, it crashes… a lot.
We have used Camtasia for more than a decade, starting with Camtasia version 6. It is often said that wise consumers avoid all first versions of software and all Microsoft products until version 3, but no-one should expect that is 20 years old (Camtasia Editor was first released in 2002) to be consistently unstable.
In fairness to the Camtasia developer, TechSmith, video editing is likely the most intensive thing non-gamers will ever do on a computer. Video editors like Camtasia will use all of a computers resources and drive them to their limit. But that still no excuse for Camtasia:
Ok, now that we have that off our chest, lets get to the point of this article. What can you do to stop Camtasia from crashing?
From our considerable experience with Camtasia, we have found the number one cause of crashes when exporting from Camtasia (i.e. rendering the video) to be the video drivers. So what can you do about it:
The first thing to do is disable hardware assistance inside Camtasia. Hardware Assistance means that Camtasia will be using your computers powerful GPU (Graphics Processing Unit aka Video Card) and if everything is not just right, Camtasia will often crash:
This will make rendering slower, but it is far less likely to crash.
This is an unexpected tip we found on the Camtasia support forum and we have have had some success with it:
Other than the interface, we have no idea what the underlying code difference is between EXPORT > LOCAL FILE and EXPORT > LEGACY LOCAL FILE, but we have seen some success with the LEGACY LOCAL FILE when the main export routine crashes.
We have noticed that Camtasia often crashes in video segments in which we have use ADD CLIP SPEED. We also found a few forums in which Camtasia users say they have reduced their clip speed from say 50x to 30x and then been able to render / export video without problems.
We understand this may annoy some, but after putting hours, days or even weeks into editing a video, you just need to get it rendered, so suck it up and break it into chunks. After those segments are rendered you can likely combine them into a single video using Camtasia or other video editing software
Anecdotally we have found two primary ’causes’ of crashes when editing video files:
If you are using an MP4 format for your source files, as we usually do, you may find converting them to some other format before you even attempt to edit them to be useful. In our case we regularly need to change from MP4’s recorded on our Samsung Galaxy cell phones to .AVI’s with XVID compression using a free tool named Virtual Dub.
We started using VirtualDub to stabilize shakey video. We have popular video on how to do this HERE.
You can download VirtualDub and the XVID codec pack directly from us HERE and then look at the screen shot below to figure out how to configure it… its far from obvious but it is very easy:
Cleaning up your computer goes like this:
Then you need to empty your recycle bin and reboot your computer. Note that a log-off is not sufficient; do a proper reboot or full shut down.
Here are some other things you can do to stop Camtasia crashes:
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Thanks for this very useful post on stopped Camtasia from crashing all the time.