Black Screen in Camtasia Canvas

Updating Drivers

Updating your drivers can help your system run more efficiently, especially with regard to screen recorders and video editors. Keeping your drivers up to date can also help prevent Camtasia from performing poorly, including presenting a blank or black screen in its canvas. The below steps/guide may help you with addressing this issue..

Identifying your hardware

While all applications are closed and your work saved, please perform the following steps:

Launching and using the DirectX Diagnostic Tool

1. Open the Windows Start Menu or the Windows Run Command (press the Windows key + R) and type dxdiag then press enter or "Run..."
2. If you are prompted to verify if drivers are signed, please press Yes/Ok then continue.
3. Once the DirectX Diagnostic reporting tool opens there may be a small status bar in the right corner of the window (see here)- once that small status disappears, please click on the "Save all information" button and save it as a .txt file to your desktop then close the DirectX Diagnostic Tool window.

Reading the DirectX Diagnostic report

To view the text (.txt) file that you just saved, please open it in a text editor like Notepad, Sublime Text, or Notepad++. We will be specifically looking at the following sections:

"System Information" Section

1. Operating System
2. Processor
3. Memory
   
   

"Display Devices" Section

1. Card Name
2. Manufacturer
3. Driver Date/Size
   
   

Once you've made note of your Card Name, Manufacturer, and the Driver Date/Size sections, you will want to navigate to the video card manufacturer's support website to check for the latest drivers. Fortunately there are only a handful of primary GPU manufacturers, so you may be able to grab the latest drivers from the following links:

Discrete video cards:

• AMD-powered video cards (ex., RX580, Radeon 5600 XT, Radeon 7900 XTX, etc.)
• nVidia-powered video cards (ex., GTX 1660, RTX 3070, RTX 4090 Ti, etc.)

Integrated video cards:

• AMD-powered onboard APUs (Radeon Embedded, Vega 3, Vega 7, etc.)
• Intel-based onboard graphics adapters (Xe, HD Graphics, Iris, etc.)

Once the drivers have been downloaded, please take the following steps:

1. Save your work
2. Exit all applications
3. Install each downloaded driver update (administrator rights may be required)
4. Restart the computer (required)

Note - some computer configurations may show multiple video cards, this is normal and quite common in laptops (though still prevalent on desktops). If your computer has multiple video cards, such as both an Intel-based graphics card (like an Intel Xe integrated video card and a nVidia-powered discrete video card), then you will want to download and install the latest drivers for both graphics adapters.

Setting the Microsoft Basic Render Driver

1. 1. Click Edit > Preferences > Advanced in Camtasia.
   2. Change the dropdown to Microsoft Basic Render Driver under the Hardware Acceleration section and then click OK.
   3. Close and re-open Camtasia and see if that works.

Using Handbrake