Comments on: Snagit And The Curse Of The Black Screen

By: Chaz

Chaz — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:43:31 +0000

I too had been getting just black when I tried on Win7 to capture w SnagIt 9, 10 or several other programjs that were supposed to work with Win 7 (XP & Vista never was a problem!).

I was led to the fix by pondering Mr. Turner’s Nov. 15 post above about Zone Alarm Extreme’s Force Field disabling key logging (includes screen captures I guess).

I have Zone Alarm free and seemingly it does not have Forcefield.

It did occur to me when wondering what else might be doing it…to disable Prevxx (15 min off mode for games). Sure enuf it worked! I will experiment with other settings in Prevxx (require PC restarts to implement) to see if I can avoid turning it off entirely (I also have Avast Free Antivirus [wasn't the culprit]).

I have struggled with this issue for 4 months & could not figure out why the Snagit Forums at Techsmith (as well as Google search results) weren’t loaded with this complaint. I guess no one else is running Prevxx.

I found this ‘black screen’ page [the page you’re reading this on) via Google. I also found rhis page re ZA on Hyperion’s Capture tool website:
http://www.hyperionics.com/hsdx/hs4faq.asp#ZAForceField

By: chrisb

chrisb — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:21:14 +0000

There is one major issue which no one seems to have mentioned as yet. If you have Windows 7 and a modern Nvidia graphics card, it is not possible to disable hardware acceleration – period. As such there are a number of video player applications that will be nigh on impossible to grab. I have work with CCTV for the Police and get hundreds of different players etc through the door. We use snagit and camtasia studio, and both of them have difficulty capturing, we have to keep an old Win XP machine with an ati card in it for such things. Snagit and camtasia really need to work on capturing from the hardware GPU overlay.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:02:08 +0000

Hello Tom Turner,

I would advice that you contact ZoneAlarm about this problem and see if they perhaps have a solution. I have tested Snagit 10 with 3 different security solutions, BitDefender, Adaware and Vipre and none of these creates any problems.

BitDefender:
http://www.softwarecasa.com/bitdefender-antivirus.html

Adaware:
http://www.softwarecasa.com/adaware.html

Vipre:
http://www.softwarecasa.com/vipre-antivirus-antispyware.html

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:43:59 +0000

Hi Mary, glad you got it sorted out.
After updating/downloading the newer version of ZoneAlarm Extreme, I’m again having the same problem, “black screen” whenever I try to capture anything with Snagit. I’ve tried everything I can think of including all the above recommendations without success.
Have you updated your ZoneAlarm with the newer version, 9.3.014.000 ? are you having the same problems again as I am?
Does anyone else have this problem after updating ZoneAlarm? and a fix?

By: Mary

Mary — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:39:10 +0000

I had the black screen problem with Camtasia but not for Snagit so just couldn’t figure it out. I would like to thank Tom Turner for your advice on Zone Alarm Extreme. I have tried everything with Hardware Acceleration and looking at DirectX etc and nothing worked for Camtasia. I’ve just followed your simple instructions on ZoneAlarm and bingo, it’s worked!!

Thanks so much Tom for sharing, without your post, I would still be tearing my hair out with frustration!

By: zadavakin

zadavakin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:11:20 +0000

I can’t capture the screen of running application on Windows 7 32-bit Ultimate either with SnagIt 9.1.3 or with much older SnagIt 7.

Instead,
1) The current state of Windows desktop is captured in Aero theme;
2) Black screen is captured in classic theme.

Previously, I successfully captured the screenshots with SnagIt 7 on Windows XP on the same hardware.

Also, it is not possible to disable/enable Monitor’s Hardware Acceleration in Windows 7 because the button in Troubleshooting tab is disabled either for generic PnP driver or for driver specific for my monitor (I’m still using LG FLATRONez T711B).

Any suggestions or fixes?

Thanks.

By: Fred Rosenblatt

Fred Rosenblatt — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:38:17 +0000

Not Browser or video related – happens from PoweerPoint as well. Turning off hardware acceleration had no effect. Seems to be a problem with trying to capture too many pixels – anything above 800 X 800 results in a black screen. Same if either width or height is too large, but I didn’t quantify it through trial and error. I looked in the Help for some indication of a size limitation before I came here, but didn’t find anything through a reasonable search.

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:32:22 +0000

The problem for me was with Zonealarm Extreme. NOW FIXED.I am able to use SnagIt 9.1.3 by changing my Zonealarm Extreme Security suite 9.1.008’s Forcefield’s browser security settings/Advanced/uncheck “block programs that secretly record your keystrokes”.
I have not had any SnagIt issues since ! THIS WORKS 100%, All the advice & tricks related to hardware acceleration were totally useless…..

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:40:33 +0000

I forgot to mention in my last post/reply that I tried every which way with the hardware acceleration and my video/graphics drivers are updated as well.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:57:37 +0000

I’ve been having the same problem of “black screen” whenever I try to capture anything in any mode while either IE or Firefox is open. If neither IE or Firefox are open then the capture works fine.
Any thoughts ? using Snagit 9.1.3 (build 19)