Hi @JoelMayer,
Greenlaw wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2024 2:24 am
JoelMayer wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2024 10:31 pm
...a silly question but i've been looking for a screen recording software that does the little "zoom to cursor" thingy... i see your videos do feature that, do you have a recommendation for me?
Hi Joel!
I wrote a reply, but the forum timed out, and I lost the text before posting it. The post was a bit long (surprise, surprise), so I’ll write it again later today.
Sorry for the delayed response, but here's some info about my screen-recording tools and workflow:
I basically use three programs for video production, and these are:
- Vegas Pro
- Camtasia
- After Effects
For the most part, I'm using Camtasia to record the screen and for 'first pass' editing and annotations. To be truthful, I used to be dismissive about Camtasia's editing capabilities; I mean, I use Vegas Pro, so what was the point? But in recent months, I completely changed my mind about it and have found Camtasia's editor is surprisingly powerful, at least for editing screen footage for training videos.
The first revelation was how easily Camtasia handled time-stretching for screen-recording footage.
For example, Vegas Pro and After Effects offer multiple ways to time-stretch footage, but both are painfully inefficient when I need to compress several days of footage into a few minutes. As you might imagine, this was a huge problem when I made the
Let’s Make A Cartoon! video. Time-compressing that much footage using Ae and Vegas took hours to set up and render, and it was a nightmare to work with!
When I started working on the
Vector Drawing, Part 1 tutorial, I had a smaller bit of footage to time-compress, but I still wanted to find an easier method. I wasn’t expecting much from Camtasia, but it turned out I just right-click on the footage, add a Time-Speed effect, and it lets me compress the footage as short as I needed in one action. There was no need for rendering multiple passes of time compression, no long waits, and no weird artifacts…it just worked! (Note: I haven't tried stretching with Camtasia, but I would likely use After Effects for that.)
This prompted me to take a closer look at its editing, graphics, and 2D camera tools. Everything feels simple but it does the job beautifully. Previously, I would do this type of animation in Ae or Vegas, but that could get cumbersome and time-consuming (it's one of the reasons why my tutorial videos have taken so long to produce,) but with Camtasia, adding these effects and animations is mostly drag-and-drop. . Now, I feel a little foolish that I didn’t take advantage of these features from the start.
Another advantage is that Camtasia efficiently records my display at full resolution (2560 X 1440), so when I edit in Camtasia Editor at FHD res and zoom in on the footage, the quality holds up nicely. (Compare the zoom quality between the last two tutorial videos to see the difference...it's pretty big. The previous video used Vegas for panning and zooming, and the latest used Camtasia for panning and zooming before outputting to 1920 x 1080 for Vegas.)
The video I posted this morning is a great example of this ‘first pass’ editing process in Camtasia. Nearly all of the recorded segments were edited in Camtasia.
Camtasia is not a perfect editing system, though. It's audio mixing tools very basic, and it’s not as accepting of third-party footage as Vegas and After Effects are. It also lacks a lot of the high-end output features: basically, it outputs .mp4 or GIF. No ProRes or even HEVC.
So, after I output my edited screen-recorded footage from Camtasia, I’ll assemble it in Vegas with Title Cards created in Ae or Photoshop, and the character animation segments created in Moho. I also do my final audio mixing (VO, SFX and music) in Vegas, which is way easier and more capable with audio than Camtasia. I call this part of production ‘final-pass’ video editing.
I use After Effects for more complicated text and camera animation for these videos, but I keep these bits minimal because it’s time-consuming. (I may use Moho for some of this when it's appropriate.)
My goal now is to create shorter single-topic tutorial videos, but I’ll more or less continue with the pipeline described above: Use Camtasia to record and edit the screen footage, including pans and zooms, and animated annotation graphics; use Vegas Pro to assemble footage from all sources (including Moho and Ae,) and for the final audio mix; use Ae Effects (or Moho) for anything that would be difficult to do with Vegas or Camtasia.
BTW, I figured out some neat tricks for working around some limitations I ran into with Camtasia, and I'll eventually share these tricks in a tutorial video. But that will have to wait because I have a ton of Moho tutorials to make first.
Hope this helps.
hilarious how the meaning can be changed by punctuation! 
