I’ve been a big fan of Camtasia for several years now. I even teach three online courses on it. They recently released a new version that has a few bells and whistles beyond the previous versions. You can see all of the updates here, but I’m going to focus on some of the ones that I think are the most impactful and have seen in my own work.
Export Speed
The first thing I’ve noticed is that the export time has drastically decreased when using video. I’ll put some screenshots below of the export differences between the previous version of Camtasia and Camtaasia 2018. For reference the video was a 20 minute 4K video shot at 100mbps. It was down-sampled to 1080p and sped up 75x to make it a time lapse.
As you can see the settings on both are the exact same.
Color
One of the other major enhancements that I have seen is color accuracy. Camtasia still doesn’t have a color correction tool (please add one!) but the export colors are now much closer to the original footage. This has been something that I’ve noticed for awhile, but there hasn’t been anything that I can do about it without using additional software. But finally, you can export video that is truly representative of the footage that was put into the program. Below you can see three different screen grabs of the differences between the two exports. On the left you have Camtasia 3 and on the right is Camtasia 2018. The 2018 output matches the original while the Camtasia 3 output overly saturates the video and makes it grainy.
File Size
One thing that has always annoyed me with Camtasia is the final file size is massive compared to other similar products. With Camtasia 2018 the file sizes are way down. As you can see in the image below there is a marked difference between the two files. On the right is Camtasia 3 and on the left is Camtasia 2018.
Final Notes
So is Camtasia 2018 worth the upgrade price. Yes and no. If you are doing just screen captures, I haven’t noticed a difference in export times. File sizes are still smaller, but storage is inexpensive and easy to get. If you do anything beyond screen recordings I think this is a worthwhile upgrade. The time you pickup in export time pays for itself. If you like the other bells and whistles it may be worth it for you as well but I don’t find myself using them very often.
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