The Problem:
I published a new course with Skill Me Up (Opsgility). When I delivered the course I rendered the video from the Camtasia project and sent that rather than the Camtasia project.The editor created a new Camtasia project importing my .mp4 file as the source. They made a few more edits to the course. The edits were mostly removing some longer pauses and a few 'filler words'.
After the course was published I noticed that I had accidentally shifted the video in one of my demos. This cut off the left side of the screen. I needed to fix it!
First Thoughts of How to Fix:
When I brought this to the attention of my editor they sent me their Camtasia project. My original video was around 2:27 and the published video was around 2:24. So in the overall course they had cut out around 3 minutes.While I have used Camtasia quite a bit I don't really know a lot of the inner workings. To fix the problem I figured I would find where the editor had made edits and duplicate them in my original project. Then I could re-render the video so the update could be published.
As I started to look at this I realized that while I would know where to make the cuts I would not have any idea how long each should be. It would be difficult to figure this out by simply playing both copies of the video (my original and the version that was published).
My second thought was to review the Camtasia project file and see if I could understand how it tracked the edits that had been done. I figured some of this out. Here is a small snippet of the json in the project file:
"start" : 235096,
"duration" : 1809,
"mediaStart" : 238757,
"mediaDuration" : 1809
I found that the following were important for what I wanted to do:
- Start -> appears to be the starting frame number of the edited video
- mediaStart -> appears to be the starting frame number from the source media
- duration -> appears to be the number of frames that were cut
I was getting ready to start manually editing my project when I had an idea...
The 'Easy' Solution:
After spending some time trying to figure out the Camtasia project file I thought that I might just be able to replace the source (.mp4) file with a corrected file. I opened my Camtasia project and moved the shifted video back into place. I then re-rendered the .mp4 file. I then replaced the source file in the editors Camtasia project with my new .mp4 and the video is fixed!
This is another example of how easy it can be to make things more complicated than then need to be!
If you are interested in checking out the course here is a link:https://www.skillmeup.com/courses/player/Introduction-to-JavaScript
