Camtasia Rev Recordings¶

Camtasia Rev is the screen recording feature built into Camtasia. When you record with Rev, Camtasia captures up to four streams — screen video, camera video, mic audio, and system audio — into a single .trec file (a QuickTime container) stored inside the .cmproj project bundle.

On the timeline, a Rev recording appears as a Group containing:

Track 0 — VMFile gradient background shader
Track 1 — UnifiedMedia with ScreenVMFile (screen) + AMFile (mic audio)
Track 2 (if camera was enabled) — UnifiedMedia with VMFile (camera) + AMFile (system audio)

The UnifiedMedia class bundles the video and audio children from the same source.

UnifiedMedia properties¶

Property	Type	Description
`.video`	`BaseClip`	Video child (`ScreenVMFile` or `VMFile`)
`.audio`	`BaseClip`	Audio child (`AMFile`)
`.has_audio`	`bool`	Whether an audio track is present
`.is_screen_recording`	`bool`	`True` if video is `ScreenVMFile`
`.is_camera`	`bool`	`True` if video is `VMFile` (camera)

Finding Rev recordings in a project¶

from camtasia import load_project
from camtasia.timeline.clips import UnifiedMedia

p = load_project('my_project.cmproj')
for track in p.timeline.tracks:
    for clip in track.clips:
        if isinstance(clip, Group):
            for inner_track in clip.tracks:
                for inner_clip in inner_track.clips:
                    if isinstance(inner_clip, UnifiedMedia):
                        if inner_clip.is_screen_recording:
                            print(f'Screen recording: video id={inner_clip.video.id}')
                            if inner_clip.has_audio:
                                print(f'Mic audio: id={inner_clip.audio.id}')
                        elif inner_clip.is_camera:
                            print(f'Camera: video id={inner_clip.video.id}')

.trec stream layout¶

A .trec file can contain up to four streams. Use ffprobe to inspect them:

ffprobe -hide_banner recording.trec

Typical output for a Rev recording with camera enabled:

Stream	Type	Bitrate	Channels	`-map` flag
Screen video	Video (tscc2)	~1450 kb/s	—	`0:v:0`
Camera video	Video (h264)	~7139 kb/s	—	`0:v:1`
System audio	Audio (aac)	~2 kb/s	Stereo	`0:a:0`
Mic audio	Audio (aac)	~55 kb/s	Mono	`0:a:1`

The mic audio stream is mono with a higher bitrate (~55 kb/s); system audio is stereo but very low bitrate (~2 kb/s). This makes it easy to tell them apart in ffprobe output.

Extracting mic audio for transcription¶

To extract the mic audio as 16 kHz WAV (suitable for speech-to-text):

ffmpeg -i recording.trec -map 0:a:1 -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 16000 mic_audio.wav

-map 0:a:1 selects the second audio stream (mic). Use -map 0:a:0 for system audio instead.