Video is jerky

[erniejay145]

what causes the recorded video to be jerky and how can I prevent that?

[HomeportVT]

Me too----

[plusone]

I don't have an answer and have found this problem too when recording a live video stream of a sporting event - I thought it was just the bad connection from Italy to Australia.

 

I guess if others are experiencing that it might have something to do with the frame rate the software is recoding at. When shooting video you get jerky movements when you start shooting above 1/50th shutter speed.

 

I've just done a google search and found this helpful info on a competitor's website http://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-camtasia-recording-performance-prior.html

Basic Tips to Improve Recording Performance

 

Your frame rate is the number of frames captured per second. For the smoothest recordings you want to strive to achieve the highest frame rate. By default the Camtasia Recorder tries to capture 15 frames per second. The recorder will drop frames if the computer becomes overburdened and the recorder cannot keep up. Here’s some ways you can improve performance:

• Record a smaller portion of your screen. Recording the full screen is harder than recording a single window.
  
• Close any applications you don’t need. They’ll hog memory, and since screen recording is a CPU-intensive process, you want to free up everything you can.
  
• On Windows Vista, disable the Aero color scheme. To do so: Start > Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization > Change the color scheme. Choose Windows Vista Basic, Windows Standard, or Windows Classic. On Windows XP, you can disable Hardware Acceleration. To disable hardware acceleration globally, right-click on the desktop and select Properties > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshooting. Set the acceleration slider to None. This method will turn off acceleration for all applications until it is manually turned back on.
  Another way to globally disable acceleration is to configure the Camtasia Recorder to turn off acceleration before each recording session and turn it back on when the recording is stopped. Tools > Options > Capture > Disable Display Acceleration During Capture. This has the side effect of blanking the screen each time the recording is started and stopped.
  There are some applications which require hardware acceleration to run properly. Games, CAD programs and TV cards are some examples.
  
• Looking for an excuse to get a new computer? If so, the statistic you want pay the most attention to is CPU. RAM and graphics cards are important, but when you’re specifically talking about recording power, Camtasia Studio is mostly taxing your CPU. Another compromise idea is to borrow a fast computer to get your recording done, then edit on your slow computer.
  

Understanding Challenges when Recording High-Motion Content

 

There are essentially two approaches to capturing screen content. Camtasia Studio uses a lossless approach. Alternatively, some recording software uses a lossy approach. Why do you care about lossless and lossy? Fair question.

Let’s cover lossless first. In this method, the recorder attempts to capture every pixel on the screen perfectly. If the recorder is stressed and can’t do it, the frame is just dropped. One way to think of it is you’ll get a series of crystal clear images, but the dropped frames make the recording jerky. Lossy recording takes a different approach. It attempts to capture every frame, but when it gets stressed it doesn’t necessarily drop the frame—instead it’ll sacrifice quality. So you may end up with a smoother recording, but you’ll see some artifacts and maybe it’ll seem blurrier.

What’s the takeaway?

Lossless recording (Camtasia Studio default) is ideal for capturing typical screen content—websites, various software applications, and PowerPoint presentations. Lossless recording suffers when you try to capture things with a lot of motion—like a streaming video, a video game, and so forth.

 

it also talks about another codec to record in - DivX - I haven't played around with this

 

So you need to select an appropriate frame rate for what you are trying to capture and lossless or lossy as per above

 

hope that helps - I'm no expert though

[gilligan103fan]

Debut 2.05 has a "Record Screen As" option called "Fast Capture" that may be worth trying. It seems to be a modified version of the "Record Screen As" avi option with a (lossless) HuffYUV codec ... both "Fast Capture" and "avi HuffYUV (Native)" create hugh files when I set the framerate to 30 fps (20GB for 30 mins of capture of a 640x480 screen area ?) . As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be much difference between these two options.

 

nb. even though both these "Record Screen As" Video options may have smoother motion compared to other options, they still aren't as smooth as the original streamed video that I was trying to capture.

 

The other approach that I briefly looked at was the "lossy DivX" method that Plusone refers to. Instead of "DivX", I tried either "avi" or "mp4" with the H264 codec with various Compression settings values that adjust the picture quality (eg. I set "Record Screen As" to "avi", Encoder Options" to "H264(Native)" and then click the "Compression Settings" button to adjust the quality level ... nb. the default quality level is "28" ). Yes you can improve the motion by lowering the quality but the picture then looks really bad on my computer ... ie. blocky.

 

ps. I just did another screen capture using "Fast Capture" with the Windows 7 Resources Monitor turned on. My computer's CPU was almost always between 30% and 40% and my Memory usage was around 30%. This tells me that my computer isn't being stressed by Debut when it does a video capture with a lossless codec. So I really shouldn't need to resort to lowering the picture quality with a lossy codec.

[Ronald Vaughan]

I have an answer to this. Reduce screen size (left click onto the three dots at upper right of computer screen).

Then,left-click the "minus" sign....changing "Zoom" to 33% instead of 100%. Usually 33% is sufficient. 

Nothing above a certain size video portal can be rendered @ 30 fps. Otherwise,it gets jerky again.

I personally use the following settings: MPEG4,Highest Quality (or 8192),plus Speakers Option for Audio. This gives .avi output (the best) but can use .mp4 .

 

 

Edited October 27, 2018 by Ronald Vaughan
Forgot some details