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What’s New in Camtasia 2019

By: Mich Donovan

Another year, another Camtasia release. My thoughts on my experience testing the new features:

  • Audio Leveling – this seems to be the marquee feature, or at least the first listed in TechSmith’s marketing. Basically, you set a project to autolevel all the various audio media in your project to the same target (-18 LUFS – this can’t be adjusted now but may be add in a future release). This will not normalize the audio within various media, so loud and soft parts will stay the same relative to each other in the same clip. This feature is mainly aimed at users who are recording in multiple places, and possibly with different microphone inputs. If you’re recording with a consistent, professional setup, this feature probably won’t add much value to you.
  • Cursor Smoothing – I’m not sure who was complaining that their cursor was moving too much on screen but this effect will algorithmically remove cursor shakiness and replace it with smooth movements based on where you click and leave the cursor on the screen.
  • Custom Keyboard – TechSmith added 10x the amount of keyboard shortcuts, so power users can now set their own shortcuts for things like zooming, adding annotations, muting audio, adding custom animations etc. (For super power users, they’ve also added some Macbook Pro Touch Bar support, allowing you to scrub through the timeline, split clips, and jump between edits).
  • Add Logos to Themes – At Duke, we have a video branding package that allows to easily add branded lower-thirds to videos in FCPX and Premiere. This feature allows you to create a similar effect in Camtasia where you could add a logo like the Chapel bug and make the video feel that much more professional.
  • Batch Export (Mac) – This is a really great addition if you’re creating dozens of videos as we do in production on online courses. After you’re done editing (or if you’re exporting screen captures of slides to be imported into another editing program), you can now just add all the relevant projects to a queue and export them all with the same settings.
  • Hide Desktop Icons (Mac) – When setting up your recording, just toggle an option to make all the icons on your desktop invisible! Very handy for clutter-prone users like myself. Note: you have to set this before doing your recording. Unlike removing the cursor, this is not something you can adjust after the recording is complete.

Those were the highlights for me, but there’s also some new updates to text formatting, device frames, visual effects, etc. Also, I learned TechSmith has its own video review tool! Cool. If you’re at Duke and looking for a video review tool, you can reach out to oit-mt-production@duke.edu and we can set you up with a trial of our preferred platform LookAt.io.

Categories: Video Production

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