Camtasia: See How File Size Increases with Quality

I recently attended an excellent webinar conducted by Lon and Michelle from LearnCamtasia . One of the points Lon mentioned was regarding “Quality” settings of the production. He suggested to use 100% quality and don’t really bother about the default Camtasia settings.

camtasia_quality_settings

The techie in me came into action and I then produced a 5 mins project (flv) in various settings just to see the impact quality settings would have on size of the published output

Here are the results (with some surprise) :

Quality (%)	Size (MB)
60	9.43
70	10.09
80	11.4
90	13.11
100	56.73

Graphs scales well for 60% -90% quality range with only a minor increase in size but as soon as the quality grows to 100%, size of the rendered video becomes ~4x the 90% quality settings! . Something beyond me. Any explanations for this behavior?

[Update: May 2017] In case you are looking for an alternative to Camtasia which can help you crank out videos extremely quickly, I have found a new tool and I am loving it. While the regular price is $97, if you sign up during the 7 days free trial, the tool will cost you $47. Check it out.

Lon has came up with a new course on Camtasia and if you’re new or want to hone your skills in Camtasia, I would highly recommend this course.