How to preserve top video quality during production in Camtasia Studio

The MP4 encoding option (which I think uses Camtasia Studio's builtin H.264 codec) cannot be tweaked to provide the same visual quality as the original capture. At least not in v8.0.2. Even if you set quality to 100, keyframes at every second and/or adjust H.264 profile/level ... nothing really helps. The image quality will be inferior compared to the quality of the original recording (the one with the "TechSmith Screen Codec 2" codec) that you can preview in Camtasia Studio.

However if you install Quicktime (you don't need Pro, the free version will do just fine) and use the MOV output, you can get what you want. Smile

Essentially all you've to do is to create a new preset in the Production Wizard, select MOV output and you're clear to go.
There was a small glitch for me with the default video settings: the "Frame reordering" checkbox is checked by default and this resulted in casual artifacts (smearing effects in small sections of the image) for me. At least when I played back in VLC. But your mileage may vary. Clearing that checkbox fixed the problem. The resulting MOV was almost (99%) the same quality as the original capture and in size it was a little bit smaller.

If you need MP4, you can use eg. Avidemux or ffmpeg to remux it (without reencoding) into an MP4. The former is available for Windows too. But actually the MOV produced by the Quicktime codec is 99% the same as an MP4 (MOVs use pretty much the same container format, the only difference is in metadata afaik). So you can treat the MOV most of the time as if it was an MP4. Smile