I'm hard at work on my newest Camtasia Studio book (for version 8, which was recently released by TechSmith). As with all of my books, there will be hundreds of screen captures. In Camtasia, I played around with some of the program's available settings (such as Font, Font Size, Color, etc) but I didn't want to keep any of those changes. Upon returning later to create the screen captures, I was dismayed to see that the changes that I made while playing around were retained by the Camtasia software. This preference change wasn't just within the current project, but within all future projects. Prior to creating screen captures, I had to return all of the settings to the initial defaults. The problem was, I didn't know what those defaults were.
I began scouring Camtasia's dialog boxes looking for a Restore Defaults button or a Reset Preferences button. I looked everywhere to no avail. Figuring I was missing something obvious, I contacted my rep at TechSmith. I heard back pretty quickly and was surprised to learn that I hadn't missed anything... there is no master reset button anywhere within the application.
All was not lost however. Instead of having to uninstall and then re-insall Camtasia to reset the preferences (something I have been told that some Camtasia developers do), you can delete Camtasia's saved settings. The location of these settings isn't in an obvious location, but it's an easy process.
- Ensure that Camtasia Studio is not running
- If you're running Windows XP, choose Start > Run; if you're running Windows 7, choose Start
- Type regedit to open the Windows Registry Editor
- Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
- Open Software
- Open TechSmith
- Open Camtasia Studio
- Delete the 8.0 folder
- Once you've deleted the 8.0 folder, close the Registry Editor
Upon restarting Camtasia, the 8.0 folder will automatically be recreated. You'll find that all of Camtasia's default settings have been restored. (Even the Welcome project you see when you first start Camtasia returns.)
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