In Camtasia 2020 for Windows, the default option is to use TSC2 for encoding screen recordings. It is our current recommendation to use TSC2.
What are some advantages of each format in the following areas?
Quality
TSC2 is very high quality and has excellent color reproduction. TSC2 is designed specifically for high quality screen content.
H264’s color reproduction is not as good and some colors may appear washed out.
Space
Because TSC2 is very high quality it does take up a more space on the hard drive
H264 takes up less space on the hard drive.
Encoding Speed
TSC2 is currently CPU only encoding.
Many video cards offer H264 hardware accelerated encoding.
Playback Speed
TSC2 is fast for playback within Camtasia.
H264 inside of a TREC container is currently much slower for playback within Camtasia. H264 inside of a MP4 container is hardware accelerated when possible.
Stability
Because TSC2 is a CPU only based encoding it performs as expected on most machines.
Because H264 can depend on external video hardware for hardware acceleration, different video cards could give slightly different results, and sometimes there are video driver issues. This can become more complex if you have a laptop.
One scenario to consider using H264 for is if you need more performance for your recordings, higher frame rate, etc… and you on a desktop PC and have a high-end end graphics card with up-to-date drivers.
