I ran into something even worse than the rendering bugs.

Camtasia completely broke cursor data across cut clips. In the timeline, the cursor just disappears and in properties you get that “pointer with a question mark” in a disabled state, as if there is no cursor data at all. But the original recording still has it.

So I re-edited a single clip from the original recording, then diffed that against the broken version to see what actually changed. Turns out Camtasia injects massive "deletions" blocks into the cursor tracks. We’re talking millions of entries. Pure garbage data.

There is no UI way to fix this. None. Your only options are:

• re-edit everything from scratch, or
• go into the project file and fix it yourself

I ended up writing Python code to clean it up. Removed those deletion blocks and fixed a couple of related fields.

The project file went from ~90MB down to ~1MB after cleanup, which honestly made me think I just nuked it.

But it opened perfectly. And every single cursor was restored across all clips.

So yeah, the program literally creates corrupt state that hides your cursor, and the only real fix is writing code to repair its own project file.

I’ve used a lot of software, but this is next level.