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[PoV]

This topic's obviously inspired by the new Aquaria Trailer, that looks freaking great.  I was busy last month cutting together a trailer myself for... business purposes.  It turned out surprisingly more difficult that I had have hoped, but I found a rather unique way of pulling it together.  I'd love to know what "The A Team" used to pull yours together, as well as anybody else.


To get things started, a bit of background on what I ended up doing.

Obviously, the secret weapon Fraps.  Trying to nab constant 60fps footage was do-able, but proved tricky, due to my hard drives not being the most defragged.  I don't know how many takes later, I ended up with nearly an hour of game footage, that was cut down to a 4 minute presentation.

Then I found myself in Virtual Dub, non destructively clipping my clips down to size.

Did my usual thang in Audition, recording a nice, friendly, albeit rushed narrative for the presentation.

But then came the real trouble.  Assembling.

Just about every app I tried had some huge problem.  Avid, Premier, MS Movie Maker, T@B Zweistein, and a list of open source ones.  If it wasn't resolution limits, it was framerate caps, inability to read my files, etc.

In the end, I found a lovely, relatively unrestricted shareware program called, can you believe it, "Video Edit Magic"!  And it was.  Relatively stable (I didn't lose anything the 1 time it crashed).  Simple.  And only $60.  It was well worth it, certainly saving my butt.


Anyone else?

[Alec]

Oo... For the latest trailer, I wrote some input recording code, recorded some moves and then had the code play back the input while dumping out screenshots on a set 1/60 second update interval. That way I could get perfect 60fps video capture at any resolution, without having to worry about the game slowing down / looking jerky.

The downside was that things didn't always play back exactly the same, as the creatures don't always act the same way.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

The downside was that things didn't always play back exactly the same, as the creatures don't always act the same way.

Write down the systems randseed then ;].

[Alec]

Its more than the randseed. The starting conditions weren't guaranteed to be the same. I could have worked at that, but it was actually kinda fun to see how things played back differently each time, and sometimes it turned out better than the original.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Its more than the randseed. The starting conditions weren't guaranteed to be the same. I could have worked at that, but it was actually kinda fun to see how things played back differently each time, and sometimes it turned out better than the original.

I did a replay system for my games, it saved the randseed and keystrokes, prooved real fun, and the replays were realy small. It would be a heck lot harder for a realtime game tough. I guess I'd be saving the event queue aditionally then -- and plan ahead to make that sufficient for a fully complete and accurate replay.

[Alec]

I really wanted to focus on cutting the trailer, and not on messing with the code. I basically created a list of input states with time stamps. That didn't work for me. Eventually what got me smooth results was recording input state and player position/rotation while recording at 1/60 second updates. That way nothing could go wrong.

So basically its a total hack, but it did what I wanted it to.

[PoV]

Ahh, hacks.  The magic that ships games.

[DrDerekDoctors]

Oo... For the latest trailer, I wrote some input recording code, recorded some moves and then had the code play back the input while dumping out screenshots on a set 1/60 second update interval. That way I could get perfect 60fps video capture at any resolution, without having to worry about the game slowing down / looking jerky.

The downside was that things didn't always play back exactly the same, as the creatures don't always act the same way.

Ooh! New trailer! Woo!

But on topic, this is the same system I'd use because my engine is completely deterministic so I can get the same playback (which has been a Godsend for tracking down rare bugs as it poops out the recorded input when stuff goes tits-up in a predictable manner).

As for the editing, I've had no experience of that but I shall look into that Video Magic thing.

I'm amazed at how a well constructed trailer can sell me on a game. I bought Gish off the back of its trailer alone, without having played the game.

[PoV]

I'm amazed at how a well constructed trailer can sell me on a game. I bought Gish off the back of its trailer alone, without having played the game.

I did the same thing.  Them crafty fellows didn't release the demo soon enough, I had to play it NOW!


Alec: What other tools did you guys use, say, to edit it together, or to compile the image files in to a video file?

[Alec]

Premiere 6.5 for editing, compositing. Use a lot of raw AVIs...

VirtualDub for converting files (man, I love VD)

Currently the files involved in making the trailer are taking up 47GB!

[DrDerekDoctors]

(man, I love VD)

I need say nothing more.

[Alec]

Yes... hush. Don't say a word. Just come over here big boy....

There! Now you have your own copy of VD.

[DrDerekDoctors]

Yes... hush. Don't say a word. Just come over here big boy....

There! Now you have your own copy of VD.

Yay!

scratches

[BMcC]

Alec!  Derek!  Dudes!

The trailer is beautiful.  Tell your bandwidth I said sorry, by the way.  After watching through the 640x480 trailer a bunch of times, I decided I needed to see the high res version also. 

I'm (still) super excited about the game.  It looks wondrous. 

EDIT:  Another thing.  I almost want to move this thread to Developer -> Technical (or maybe Business) on account of all the useful trailer-cutting knowledge.

But perhaps a dedicated thread would be better ::hint hint::. 

[lowpoly]

If you can afford it, just the Digital Video bundle from Adobe. It's an investment, yes, but you get every possible tool you could need to not only build your trailer, but also make art assets for your games/website/marketing.

The first route of course would be to do it all in Premiere. It has everything you need for cutting a movie. Now if you're up to it, cut the whole thing in After Effects. You don't get realtime audio scrubbing (kinda)like Premiere but AE is infinitely more powerful in terms of titling, compositing, effects, etc. If you learn AE well enough you might find yourself never touching Premiere again.

[Alec]

Premiere can be pretty buggy and slow. I'm going to take a look at Blender's video editing side when I get the chance. fingers crossed

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Adobe FTW. IMHO, up to date, all it's software is unbeatable in it's field, from Photoshop to After Effects(*). Too bad it's so expensive :/

(*) And I used a lot of them, including Illustrator, InDesign and Premiere...

[ravuya]

Through trial and error, I finally figured out the best way to handle this.

Fraps -> VirtualDub -> iMovie

It uses up a hell of a lot of disk space, but it's worth it -- iMovie handles it quite adequately. The only real problem is sitting there and filming enough of it to cut a proper trailer. I wonder how hard it'd be to write an MPEG recorder for my game.

[PoV]

I think anybody around here should be able to appreciate this.

Rampart

A beautiful example of game trailer overkill.

[torncanvas]

Hahaha, that is so METAL.