The clip can be recovered if you open the temporary directory where
Camtasia stores the raw captures in AVI format. The path to the
temporary directory can be found by opening the
Camtasia Recorder > Tools > Options > Program > Temporary
file folder (I'm using v.5 so it may be a little different in other
versions).
I've found that there's a certain workflow that seems to work best and
you can avoid accidentally erasing your temporary files and having to
start your capture session over from the beginning...
- Stop Camtasia Recorder - Pressing the Stop button on the
Recorder likely won't work, so open the Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+DELETE)
and select "CamRecorder.exe" from the Processes tab and click "End
Process". Don't open Camtasia Studio right away after doing this step
- You'll likely be prompted to recover the recording and in my
experience Camtasia hasn't done a very good job at being able to do
this successfully and you may end up losing your temp files.
- Recover your raw capture files - Navigate to the path
where Camtasia stores its Temp files (look above for instructions).
Typically, there will be a folder titled "CamCapture{random string of
numbers/letters}" - look for a folder with a date modified attribute of
the date/time you were working on your project. In that folder, there
will likely be several audio and video files as well as an XML data
file. The video files will all be 1GB apiece as Camtasia splits the
capture into chunks and then pieces them back together to create one
continuous file. Cut and paste the files from this folder into a new
location outside of the Temp directory. The most important one is the
FileWriter{random string}.avi as this is the pieced together file - It
will have the largest file size.
- Add your media files to the clip bin/timeline - Start a
new Camtasia project and import the FileWriter{xxx}.avi clip into the
Clip Bin and drag it onto the timeline. Now all of your video/audio
should be recovered and available for you to edit. If you have
particularly long clips, you may want to check how the audio syncs with
the the video towards the end of the clip. If it's messed up at all,
you may want to try adding the smaller, chunked recording segments
sequentially onto the timeline to see if that helps. If the
FileWrite{xxx}.avi clip is good though, you can delete all of the other
smaller audio and video clips associated with the capture from your pc
to save space - just keep the FileWriter{xxx}.avi clip - the XML can be
deleted too.
Good luck - We've had the same trouble here and we use Camtasia almost
everyday. In my experience, this seems to happen more frequently when
we capture larger dimensions - especially if the capture contains full
motion video (as opposed to just screen captures of a product demo or
something) and we always seem to have trouble when capturing things
that play back FLV or SWF clips at a higher bitrate. This issue is
also described in
TechSmith's Camtasia knowledge base.
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