Camtasia Studio 8 Only Opens Once per Start-up

SOURCE: Memory Problems

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...

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
3. 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.

SOURCE: camtasia video capture = black screen,

I will not be back to your service. Your 'smilemaker' expert was rude, succinct, had no idea how to solve the problem and gave me a bad taste in my mouth. I have since identified the problem to be one of Direct X variety which is not working correctly in the register.