Convert alpha MOV’s to work in Camtasia 9

So…a HUGE pain in the butt with Camtasia 9 is that Techsmith removed support for QuickTime and effectively rendered all MOV files with alpha transparency useless. Since then, they have added back support for these but…only if they are encoded with the PNG alpha codec.

The problem is: A TON of alpha MOV’s out there (including ones from several of my favorite tools like Viddyoze) are encoded with the Animation codec and will NOT work in CS 9.

Originally I found an easy way to re-encode these MOV’s using the QuickTime Pro version and it works great but unfortunately you can’t buy it for Windows anymore.

The good news is that one of my students brought to my attention another utility that does the re-encoding that works and it’s free!

Here’s a tutorial and links below:

LINKS:

DOWNLOAD #1 ==> FFMpeg Rendering Engine

DOWNLOAD #2 ==> FFE User Interface

The problem is that TONS of these very cool & handy video clips are created with one of the other many encoding methods so Camtasia chokes on them.

For example, one of my favorite resources for these videos is a platform called Viddyoze and they use one of the most common methods called the Animation codec.

So…our goal is to convert or “re-encode” the file from the Animation codec to the PNG alpha codec.

Once we do that? All will be good!