The recording component of Camtasia Studio uses a custom-built, highly optimized, lossless codec for low motion video such as those found in desktop screen recordings (e.g. where a mouse cursor is moving around the screen). Of note, the codec doesn't actually record the mouse but rather its position on the screen and which mouse cursor is being displayed at the time (I don't recall how it handles custom cursors like those found in games). It's a nifty abuse of how Windows GDI works where the mouse cursor isn't actually part of the GDI screen buffer but applied much later in the render pipeline (i.e. it's the same reason why pressing Printscreen on the keyboard doesn't include the mouse cursor). The rest of the codec determines which portions of the screen have changed and only stores the minimum required information to recreate the image kind of like animated GIFs but supports storing full RGB colorspace information. The result is a very tiny file for most desktop screen recording sessions.
The TechSmith video codec (TSCC/TSC2) is not designed for recording high motion video. It'll do it, but you'll waste a ton of disk storage in the process.
I've used OBS to record my screen in the past but I'm also looking for something with higher quality (without dropping another $250 on the latest version of Camtasia or trying to upgrade my ancient Camtasia software license to v9). The problem with OBS that I run into is lots of visual artifacts around text much like a JPEG image. If I stay on the same screen for several seconds, the image slowly clears up but it is distracting at times. The other problem is that screen recordings with OBS tend to make whites "gray" when post processing the video. Notably, overlaying images on top of the recorded video shows a stark contrast between actual white and the video. The "white is gray" issue is a problem with OBS + the codecs it uses by default. For my normal screen recording videos where I read a script, I don't really care about the quality loss and OBS is a pretty nice piece of software to get the job done. The current video I'm working on, however, needs to retain color accuracy and so this thread is relevant to me. I tried various settings with OBS mentioned in this thread but everything I tried produced sub-par results OR produced a file that could only be played in VLC but not edited in any of my video editing tools.
CamStudio is the next thing I tried. I've used it before but it's not updated very frequently and is still (many, many years after it launched) a fairly terrible piece of software. A short screen recording of 10 seconds produces a 480MB AVI file but, on the upside, the file was of very good quality. However, after each recording, CamStudio crashes. It's approximately the same awful experience I remember from a decade ago. I'd rather dig out my ancient license of Camtasia Studio than use CamStudio.
Then I ran into this project today:
https://github.com/rdp/screen-capture-recorder-to-video-windows-free
The 10 second recording was a mere 700KB and had very good quality and accurate color reproduction with one very tiny artifact - just two barely noticeable pixels that were off from actual - in the recording I made and could have just been a VLC playback issue. The software requires Java to be installed to use the GUI, which is ridiculous for a 4-button application that mostly just launches ffmpeg. There is a DirectShow filter that is now installed on my system that hopefully won't crash my timelines by just being installed - poorly written DirectShow filters are the worst as they're nearly impossible to debug. It looks like Sony Vegas can't handle the MP4 files that the above program produces but DaVinci Resolve handles them just fine. IMO, this works well enough as an open source free desktop screen recording solution that is on par with the TechSmith codec. Maybe OBS could adopt that codec (or portions of it) into a future release for a dedicated "desktop recording" profile? I'd love to have an all-in-one recording solution that produces files that work everywhere.
