Flickering mouse pointer

[cosp]

After I upgrade to Camtasia 5 then I got problem with flickering mouse pointer when I record.
I use 2 monitor and record on 1 screen and working on the other one when recording.
With Camtasia4 there was no problem with flickering mouse pointer.
How can I solve this

[jl_678]

I have no solution for you, but can concur that I see the same thing. The cursor flashes rapidly in v5 and it never did this before in v4.

[dro085]

The cursor flicker is an unfortunate side effect (Windows XP bug?) of capturing layered windows while recording the screen. This option was turned on by default in v5.0 of Camtasia Recorder and in the PowerPoint add-in. The reason it's now on by default is that layered windows are much more commonly used by Windows applications today. Most tooltips are layered windows. So is the translucent image you see while dragging an icon across your desktop. So are any windows (on XP) that appear translucent. Other windows could have the layered windows flag set, but you might not even know it from their appearance. If you turn the "Capture layered windows" option off, certain windows may be missing from your recording. You would see them on screen during recording, but they would not get captured. We found more and more users hitting this problem (windows missing from the recording) and we felt this was a worse problem than the cursor flickering during recording. I did try to fix the flickering in this case, but it seems to be a limitation of XP, and even the simplest test case showed this behavior. It's important to note that the cursor flicker is NOT visible in the recorded file. But it is annoying (to me anyway).

If you're more worried about the cursor flicker than windows being missing from your recording, then you can turn off the option to capture layered windows. Here's how:

If recording with Camtasia Recorder, uncheck Tools > Options > Capture layered windows.

If recording with the PowerPoint Add-in installed by CS 5.0.0, there is currently no option in the UI, and the option is ON by default. We may add a checkbox to the PowerPoint Add-in for this option in the future. However, I did add a registry key in case this issue came up.

I've attached a .reg file (remove .txt extension to use it) that turns off the capture layered windows option in the PowerPoint Add-in. Make sure PowerPoint is closed, then run the .reg file, restart PowerPoint and you'll be recording without capturing layered windows.

Hope this helps.

[cosp]

Thanks for the quick solution

[pgale]

Ah thanks for the info - I've wondered for years why this happens - now I know. Unfortunately I have also been caught out by the 'missing IE UI elements' in some web applications I've captured - this has resulted one time in an expensive and embarrasing re-capture with my client! BTW, I run a video production company and have used Camtasia since the early days many years ago - I introduced it to a few of my larger clients and it has become a buzz-word for screen capture

Can I flag this too as an area to put more development into (if possible) - I was actually doing a recording two days ago on a customer site on several laptops. The flickering was so bad that it made the screen capture EXTREMELY difficult to do - the resultant captures were of a very poor quality as the presenter would often move the mouse around a lot just to find out where it was! It also affected timings and slowed the pace down considerably and has resulted in a lot more edit time.

The other situation where this is far from idea is: We often produce CD ROM's of live presentations. As part of the workflow, we sometimes capture presentations live using Camtasia (to get real-time demos etc - as this would take so much extra time in post). With the layered window capture enabled, this is impossible to do as the flickering cursor is unacceptable in this environment - we would now use FRAPS instead!

As just mentioned, I don't believe FRAPS has this problem? COuld you please escalate this as a serious issue - especially as you mentioned that it's now enabled by default. I'm surprised you don't have many more potential users complaining - maybe they just use alternative software?

As I said before, I'm a long time user of Camtasia and love it - especially the newer Flash support As a video professional though, this issue is a big stumbling block for the software.

Cheers,

Paul.

[rosymond]

Originally Posted by dro085

The cursor flicker is an unfortunate side effect (Windows XP bug?) of capturing layered windows while recording the screen. This option was turned on by default in v5.0 of Camtasia Recorder and in the PowerPoint add-in. The reason it's now on by default is that layered windows are much more commonly used by Windows applications today. Most tooltips are layered windows. So is the translucent image you see while dragging an icon across your desktop. So are any windows (on XP) that appear translucent. Other windows could have the layered windows flag set, but you might not even know it from their appearance. If you turn the "Capture layered windows" option off, certain windows may be missing from your recording. You would see them on screen during recording, but they would not get captured. We found more and more users hitting this problem (windows missing from the recording) and we felt this was a worse problem than the cursor flickering during recording. I did try to fix the flickering in this case, but it seems to be a limitation of XP, and even the simplest test case showed this behavior. It's important to note that the cursor flicker is NOT visible in the recorded file. But it is annoying (to me anyway).

If you're more worried about the cursor flicker than windows being missing from your recording, then you can turn off the option to capture layered windows. Here's how:

If recording with Camtasia Recorder, uncheck Tools > Options > Capture layered windows.

If recording with the PowerPoint Add-in installed by CS 5.0.0, there is currently no option in the UI, and the option is ON by default. We may add a checkbox to the PowerPoint Add-in for this option in the future. However, I did add a registry key in case this issue came up.

I've attached a .reg file (remove .txt extension to use it) that turns off the capture layered windows option in the PowerPoint Add-in. Make sure PowerPoint is closed, then run the .reg file, restart PowerPoint and you'll be recording without capturing layered windows.

Hope this helps.

HI,
I know I am late on this, but this solution doesn't work for me... I am not using powerpoint for recording, but I have the plugin installed. How exactly do I disactivate it for a normal recording, using your file?
Thanks a lot!

[bupaje]

I've been having a similar issue on my HP Laptop, with Vista and Camtasia 5 while attempting to record a Photoshop tutorial. After trying a lot of other things I found that disabling "enable desktop composition" in the visual perfomance settings for Vista does the trick.