Sharing independent game trailer production experience

Sharing independent game trailer production experience

It is critical to present your work in this industry. The trailer can be your business card. A beautiful trailer can display game functions in advance without the need to complete the game. So we plan to create a trailer for Okhlos.

We have made some videos, but we want to make some more elegant things for our first official trailer. It eventually works more effectively than we think. However, we feel that we have learned a lot from it. I would like to share with you some of our tips on making this play trailer.

First of all, I should declare that I am not good at video editing, so for those who already have experience in this field, these experiences may be useless at all. These tips apply to people who do not have the same professional knowledge but want to create a trailer. You may think that it is very easy to create a gameplay trailer, because you only need to show the gameplay, but believe me, it is not that easy.

Plan

One thing we learned from this is that carefully planning the content you want to display helps save a lot of time. We have determined the best part we want to show to others and made a list for it.

Then, you have to set the narrative links of the trailer and the order of each part. It will take some time, but it is also an important step to clarify the pace and climax of the trailer.

It is easy to set the pace, because we have a sound track created by @ ashellinthepit, so we can start with it. This is a good limitation because it provides us with a very fixed structure.

Continuous Lens

You may think that some gameplay procedures are enough, but you still need a lot of continuous footage.

We know what we want to display, but to make some changes, after all, we just completed the first level when creating the trailer), we had to clip a large number of shots for each function in different rounds. Changing the appearance of a level and using different perspectives also helps make each link look different.

Therefore, you need to prepare a large number of continuous recordings. We made 61 video clips. We have prepared a video of 20 GB or 10 minutes for this trailer. We know the length of the trailer is nearly 45 seconds.) I think it is a good proportion to have a continuous shot 10 times longer than the length you aim.

You have to record a large number of different scenes of each function. You will use this content during editing.

Editor

With the draft of each link, we noticed that there were still some unexecuted items. In addition, it may take too much time to integrate the different content we want to display. In this case, using Unity helps us a lot. We can drag the content into the scenario and capture it in the video.

Therefore, editing the game in any way we need is indeed helpful for creating trailers.

The only problem is that Unity 3.5.7 does not allow you to display the editor in full screen mode. Therefore, all consecutive lenses captured in this way must be adjusted in the video editor. Therefore, we recommend that you keep recording at the same size and location, so that when you use the lens, you can save the time and make it run automatically.

How to record

We use the Fraps program to capture videos. It works very well, but there are other things you need to pay attention to when capturing videos:

* Remember that video recording is a very powerful task for your machine, so you need to run it on a device with a higher power. We captured videos on my computer because it is the most powerful computer in the office.

* Ideally, you need two hdds. One of them is the SO and the game, and the other is used to output the recorded data. Fraps is not that useful when reading and writing the same HDD.

* The most important thing is that you have to spend time renaming each part of the record. When you have more than 60 videos, you certainly don't want to parse each thumbnail, or open each video to view what it is. Therefore, you need to rename each captured video and add a meaningful name to it. For example, you need to record the reason for this clip.

* In addition, keep the clip brief. Having a large number of small files is like having two or three incredible files. You have to edit a video on the editing software. However, if you find that you are not planning to use a video during editing, you can easily delete it.

In addition, I also found that the excellent VLC is not only a great player, but can also edit videos! This is an amazing discovery because it allows me to remove lengthy movies from video projects and replace them with smaller videos.

You have to adopt advanced control mode. You can convert a larger video into a smaller video! As shown in

You have to press the record button and stop recording. This can generate a folder in my documents. In short, using VLC can save you a lot of time and generate a more scalable video project.

Software

Finally, I want to mention the software I used to edit videos.

I am not a video editing professional. I made the simplest choice, that is, using Adobe Premiere. It is very intuitive. You can easily manage the edited videos when you want to get the video. I know there are a lot of more professional software than this, but Premiere is already able to provide all the tools required for independent game trailers.

Setting a large number of monitors does help you preview a file while arranging a timeline or file.

Another thing I learned with Premiere is that pressing Enter can optimize the fps of the preview window. I still don't understand the principle. It is related to a Renderer and will occupy a lot of your HDD space. My guess is that we need to render everything in the preview size to better process the operation.

My last thought about the software was that it was indeed helpful to guide the configuration of Youtube videos.

An important part here is the format of H.264, VBR on Bitrate, and the target resolution is 264*1920 on Youtube at least 1080 p ). In the past, Youtube did not support frame rates of over 30 FPS, but now they can rebuild 60fps. In addition, you are likely to make more than one video, so you need to save these settings for future projects in the preset.

Audio

Our audio was produced by Gordon, our leader and SFX staff. Initially we thought that the audio he provided was enough for our trailer, but when we had the trailer, Gordon proposed to add some SFX.

Adding sound effects improves the experience of trailers. You can find the differences, so if you have a musician, you 'd better let the other party participate in the preparation of the trailer. Now, if you have no music staff, but want to show your work, you can search for a creative track. In addition, it is best to turn off any music you may use in the game. If SFX is integrated, it is best to use audio to capture the video frequency and reduce the volume in the video clip.

Summary

Iteration, which seems absurd in other situations, is a common practice in the art field. The biggest thing to help preview videos is to make them twice. I made a trailer for an early version and learned a lot from it, but it took almost one day to complete it very quickly.

After I had a video, I shared it with some acquaintances. This gave me a lot of feedback on the final version, but I found that it is more interesting to see that everyone's views on the most important part of Okhlos are different. Some people want to show a wide range of views, while others just want to scale the camera lens. Everyone has different opinions on Okhlos. Thanks to this video, we can find some of the requirements and improve the expectations of the audience on some odd psychological aspects.

Through these feedback, I made a video again. I once again captured what I needed and made a lot of adjustments based on my original ideas.

It may sound silly to create a trailer from scratch, but in today's age, a great trailer is your package. So it takes the necessary time. If you want to have more plans than me, you may need to capture the video again, but of course you need to create more versions of trailers for further iteration.

Link: http://www.cocoachina.com/gamedev/designer/2014/0804/9302.html