Zooming: The Often Misunderstood Half-Holy Grail of Screencasting Quality

“Zooming” is one of the things that many, many Camtasia users–ourselves included–want to do with their screen recording, and rightly so. It allows us to record everything to show context, but then get in close to show details (kind of the best of both worlds).

Knowing how important it is, we try to cover at least the basics in the Getting Started series (6: Increase viewer understanding: Zoom, Pan, Bam). However, despite showing how to “zoom,” we don’t talk much about what a “zoom” is and what it’s really doing to the video. As a result, we see a lot of people unknowingly making decisions that negatively affect the quality of their screencast (e.g. unreadable text and fuzzy details).

So, here’s a quick run-through of the three most common misconceptions related to “zooming” in screencasts that will help YOU make better quality screencasts.