I'm making videos from screen captures and I'm lost!
February 25, 2013 8:31 AM   Subscribe

I've been tasked with creating YouTube-quality videos using clips generated by the screen capture software applications (Camtasia and Snapz Pro X. I have to bring these clips into Adobe Premiere for editing and to add titles and audio. I can't get my head around the various resolutions at play here and how best to match them up, so rather than more rambling narrative let me ask a few direct questions;

1) Should the screen captures be made at the highest screen resolution available or should they be made at the same resolution as the final video sequence I create in Premiere?
2) What if my Premiere sequence is smaller in resolution from a capture? Can I shrink the capture down to fit the space without losing clarity?
3) Can I export videos from Premiere that do not have standard dimensions (640x480, 720x480, etc.)? Can a final video be, say, 1280x712 or something like that and, if so, how and can that video be uploaded to YouTube?
4) Is there better screen capture software out there that I should consider?
5) Is there a really good resource on the web or in print that would walk me through these resolution issues?

and, finally,

6) Is there anything else I should know that I might not know?!?
posted by Jamesonian to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
This might be a dumb question, but why to you have to export from Camtasia to Premiere for titles and audio? Camtasia allows you to add both.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:50 AM on February 25, 2013


1)Make screen captures at highest resolution possible. Will provide flexibility for later.

2)Yes.

3)It's been some time since I worked in Premiere, but yes, the AVI output module at the least allows custom resolutions. Mind you, Youtube's player is 16:9, so they will add requisite black borders for videos that aren't.

6)Go through Youtube's upload guidelines, if you haven't already.
posted by Gyan at 9:49 AM on February 25, 2013


Response by poster: @Burhanistan– Thanks for the reply. I understand that YouTube will properly display at various resolutions but my problem is in how to balance the original screen cap clip resolution with the Premiere editing sequence with its own resolution settings.

@KokuRyu– Thanks, also, for the reply. The clips need significant editing, color correction, SFX and audio balancing in addition to the titling. Also, I don't create the screen caps- they're provided to me.

@Gyan– Thank you as well for the reply. Very helpful information and it confirms my intuition, i.e. more resolution is always better.
posted by Jamesonian at 10:01 AM on February 25, 2013


« Older Russian (or Allied) accounts of Berlin, April 1945...   |   Madison needs more rest Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.