Producing High Quality Videos for YouTube with Camtasia
A couple of weeks ago, I started to use Camtasia Studio to create video tutorials via screencast. Usually, I’d like to make a full screen capture, and upload the produced videos to YouTube. However, the video qualities were not as good as I expected. So I googled the quality issue, and finally figured out the solution.
Production Settings of Camtasia Studio
I found many users confused about how to produce high quality videos with Camtasia Studio. Here is the answer from Camtasia: Produced videos are blurry or seem low quality. The key point is the aspect ratio. According to my tests, if your screencast is non-16:9, the only way of producing high quality videos is to choose Custom production settings, and keep your original dimensions, such as 1680x1050:
Any produced video, which is converted from non-16:9, will be blurry and seem low quality with Camtasia Studio even if you change the quality value to max in settings:
Note: if you want to produce MOV file, you have to install QuickTime and the EnSharpen decoder. It won’t work until you restart your operating system: 
So how to make high quality videos with Camtasia Studio? It’s pretty easy! Making video aspect ratio 16:9! If your screencast resolution is 1080P, congratulations, you don’t need to make any setting changes. You can generate the high quality videos via the steps: Produce and share > Custom production settings > AVI > TechSmith Screen Codec 2 > Editing dimensions video size > Finish.
Resolution and Aspect Ratio for YouTube
I found the YouTube online help Recommended upload encoding settings, which mentioned YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratios video player. The perfect resolution for YouTube player should be:
- 2160p: 3840x2160
- 1440p: 2560x1440
- 1080p: 1920x1080
- 720p: 1280x720
- 480p: 854x480
- 360p: 640x360
- 240p: 426x240
If the uploaded video files are non-16:9, they will be processed with pillar boxes or letter boxes.
The resolution of my screencast was originally 1680x1050, which is the maximum resolution supported by my Dell monitor. That’s why my uploaded videos couldn’t fit YouTube player well. Now, I’ve changed my display monitor to 1080P, and finally created the perfect screencast for YouTube:
