Avoiding interface lag when using Camtasia
July 14, 2006 by AndrewA couple of people mentioned lag problems in using Camtasia for recording usability test sessions. The symptom is that the interface-under-test slows down because of the overhead caused by the simultaneous Camtasia recording processes.
One solution that has worked for us is to use VNC (Virtual Network Computing) and Camtasia on two computers. The subject’s computer runs the interface-under-test and the VNC server. A second recording computer runs the VNC client and Camtasia. The interactions done on the user’s computer are shared with the recording computer (via VNC), where Camtasia does the capture.
VNC does introduce some lag on the subject’s computer, but in our experience it is much better than Camtasia alone.
You may need to adjust some of the quality settings in VNC and Camtasia to get the best recording results. You may also want to try some of the various implementations of VNC (e.g., RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC).
Julien wrote:
September 4th, 2006 at 04:17
The lag usually comes from a cheap shared video subsystem. Get a good video card and the lag should go away.