Import Camtasia:mac Recordings into Professional Video Tooling

Lots of folks use Camtasia Studio and Camtasia:mac to record their screen, but want to edit / composite the recording inside professional tools such as Final Cut Pro, Premiere, After Effects, or Vegas. The rub has always been that in order to get the footage into these tools you first needed to transcode the video from the proprietary recording format to a supported container / codec. Oh and by the way, you’d like to retain the lossless quality and small file sizes found in the original, but proprietary codec. Fat chance, right?

Not so fast. I’m here to tell you that its not just possible, but downright simple to directly import and edit screen recordings made by Camtasia:mac in the video tooling of your choice on the mac. You heard that right – direct import without transcoding the video. No long wait times. No bloated file sizes. Lossless footage. For realz. It’s the shiznit. Check it out.

Auto-generate XMP Markers in After Effects

Turns out that After Effects will generate markers automatically based on XMP, but you must toggle this feature on in your global preferences.

This would allow you to import a Premiere Pro file with speech-to-text transcription and get markers automatically generated.

Day Two MAXies

Only one presenter gets a golden star from me–Michael Coleman’s (an After Effects Product Manager) efficient, yet droll session on After Effects expressions left me quietly humming. Expressions eliminate the tedium of keyframing and drive some seriously wicked effects.

I had high hopes for a session called “Next-Generation Flex Skinning,” but Ely had covered most of the salient points in his Gumbo talk so this one sort of fell flat for me. If you haven’t seen Ely or you’re looking for skinning examples built on top of Gumbo then it’s probably worthwhile. However, it was encouraging to listen to someone UI nerdy enough to argue over beer about whether a radial knob (a range scrubber) fits under the same component framework definition as a slider (a range scrubber). Ultimately the Gumbo team’s answer was no, but those nerds are my kind of people.

The Sneak Peaks were also a big winner. Due to some smart tactical decisions (yay beer) this was a fun event. Nice work Ted.