There is nothing frustrating in video Screen-casting like a client telling you that the quality of the videos you sent to him/her are horrible. Considering the time you have spent recording, editing and finally delivering the video; being told this is heartbreaking.
With this said, the client is always right. So, you have to find a solution or else, the client may decide not to pay you at all.
Now, before you starting thinking about re-recording the videos, here are the best approaches to solving this problem.
Ask The Client How He/She is Playing The Videos
Many a times, the problem may be emanating from the client. Some video players do not play some formats. Also, if the video is rendered in 2K or 4K quality; and he/she tries to play the video on a small laptop of 18 inch screen using windows media player or any other player, it will lag and look as if it has some scratches on it. This is because of high video resolution. If you are sure the quality of the video is good and can play fine on your system, advise the client about it. Tell them that 2K and 4K videos only play smoothly on 24 inch and 27 inch screens consecutively. This way they can try other ways. The best solution for this case will be uploading the video to Youtube and choosing 1080p settings on youtube video player.
Ask Them To Download The Video To Their Desktop And Play
Am sure most freelancers and clients collaborate and share files via FTP. The most popular here being google drive and dropbox. If you use one of these FTP’s to share video files, you will agree with me that playing videos directly online is sometimes a big problem. With this said, while sharing high quality videos, it’s important to notify the client that the quality of the videos might be compromised when played directly from the FTP thus they should download them for the best viewing results.
If at this point you find that the problem is indeed originating from you, the the following steps will help you find a solution.
Choose Full Screen When Recording Screens
There are two things that will determine the final output quality of your video. First is the screen resolution you choose from the Camtasia screen recorder. The best option is recording Full screen. You can cut out sections of the screen you don’t want while editing.
Second, is the zoom percentage of your browser. This is if you are recording a tutorial that requires the use internet browser. if you are recording it on 24 inch screen, set the zoom on your chrome browser to 125% and 150% for 27 inch screen. This will make text on your screen recordings easy to read. Also, the quality of your screen recordings will be good.
Choose Editing Canvas Dimensions To At-least 1920×1080 Pixels
Most clients are happy with these dimensions. This is good for editing all the recordings as your can stretch video to fit the screen. Also with this setting, you can render videos in lower HD resolution like 720p.
NOTE: If you edit a video recorded in a 4K screen resolution with 1920×1080 canvas dimension, the final video output will be clear and crisp.
Video Production Settings
Lastly, the video quality problem may be arising from your final production settings. It’s important to create a custom present for this in Camtasia. Here, there are two key things to look into; first is the key-frame rate and secondly is the encoding mode. The lower the key-frame rate the higher the quality of your videos. I usually set my key-frame rate to between 5 to 10 depending on the video duration. Lower keyframes results in a large video file. It’s also good to set encoding mode percentage to at least 75%.
Bonus tip!
If you are recording videos of you scrolling down a page, you computer RAM will determine how smooth the scroll will be. Low RAM will record choppy screens while high RAM will record smooth scrolls. Also, it is important to install more RAM when recording Game Plays. 16 GB of RAM or more is recommended.
And that is it from me today.
If you need help to create and produce professional screen-cast videos or any type of ex-plainer video, request a free quote here.
Till next time, bye bye and take care.
You can follow me on social media @cheptionymutai
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