SOLVED: Stop Camtasia From Crashing

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:

1. Lack of useful crash analysis. Other software often will tell you why they crashed and suggest “fixes”
2. Terrible technical support for crashes

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?

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A – How To Stop Camtasia From Crashing When Exporting a Video?

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:

A1 – Disable Hardware Assistance

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:

1. Click EDIT
2. Click PREFERENCES
3. Click the ADVANCED tab
4. Change the HARDWARE ACCELERATION dropdown to USE SOFTWARE-ONLY MODE

This will make rendering slower, but it is far less likely to crash.

A2 – Use The Batch Process To Export /Render Your Video

This is an unexpected tip we found on the Camtasia support forum and we have have had some success with it:

1. Close Camtasia
2. Open Camtasia and select NEW PROJECT (i.e. make sure you do NOT have any files or projects open)
3. Click FILE > BATCH PRODUCTION (in Camtasia 2022 and newer)
   1. In older versions, it was at TOOLS > SHARING > BATCH PRODUCTION
4. Click ADD FILES/PROJECTS and add the project you want to render / export
5. Click NEXT through the wizard selecting the options you want

A3 – Use LEGACY EXPORT

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.

A4 – Reduce Clip Speed

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.

A5 – Split Your Video Into Segments

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

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B – How To Stop Camtasia From Crashing When Editing a Video?

Anecdotally we have found two primary ’causes’ of crashes when editing video files:

B1 – Change Source Video Formats

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:

1. In VirtualDub, click the VIDEO menu
2. Click COMPRESSION
3. Select the compression you want, we suggest the XVID MPEG-4 CODEC (which you can download for free HERE)
4. Drag your video onto VirtualDub and then click FILE
5. Click SAVE AS AVI

B2 – Cleanup Your Temporary Files

Cleaning up your computer goes like this:

1. In Camtasia, click EDIT > PREFERENCES > ADVANCED and see where it is keeping its temporary files
   1. If you are lost, you can see in the screen shot above (section A1) – this setting is just under HARDWARE ACCELERATION section
2. Exit or END TASK on Camtasia to make sure it is not running
3. Go to the location of Camtasia’s temporary files and delete everything
4. Delete EVERYTHING from C:\USERS\ < YOUR NAME> APP DATA \ TEMP
   1. If you don’t see the APP DATA folder, don’t worry, you just need to enable VIEW HIDDEN FILES as Microsoft describes HERE.
5. Delete EVERYTHING you can from C:\WINDOWS\TEMP
   1. Some files and folders here will be “in use” and so they can’t be deleted, that is OK
6. Many people are shocked to find that Camtasia does NOT keep its screen recording in the TEMP file location and worse, Camtasia does NOT delete screen recording files when you right click and select DELETE on screen recording media when in Camtasia.
   
   As a result it is not uncommon to have years worth of old useless screen recordings on your computer. You should delete all of the old junk recordings if for no other reason than to get the space back.

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.

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C – How To Make Camtasia More Stable In General

Here are some other things you can do to stop Camtasia crashes:

1. Reboot your computer
   • not just a log off… shut it down to clear everything from memory and start again
2. Upgrade versions of Camtasia
   • Because there are so few enhancements to new versions of Camtasia we usually upgrade every second version
3. Update your video card drivers
4. Update your computers BIOS / firmware
5. Replace your video card
6. Complain to TechSmith (the developer of Camtasia)… good luck with that

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