Some of you might have noticed that I have made a new TWTPB trailer. If not check it out below. I uploaded it to vimeo (among others) I have taken a liking to vimeo as they offer higher quality than most other video uploading services. Anyway I'd thought I'd take a moment and describe how I usually make videos and trailers like this.

Creating a Game Play Video

1. Record Game Play

I use Fraps to record various tidbits of game play. I typically record quite long sessions. I always record without music since it would be very strange to have different snippets of music playing all the time. There are probably ways of stripping the music/sound, but I often want the sound effects in there.

2. Edit

I really have very little knowledge about this and there are probably a bunch of softwares out there in various price ranges. I have found that Windows Movie Maker (that came preinstalled on my Vista HP laptop) works fine for me. I will let you add sound, transitions and texts. You don't have full control and there are probably limitations on what you can achieve.

I don't know the first thing about dramaturgy in videos, but I do use a few guidelines. The first one is to keep it short. T.W.T.P.B is an action game so this works well. You can almost always cut the clips very short, 5 sec is actually a very long time. I guess less is more. I also like to keep my videos under two minutes long. Then I guess you can always look at videos you like and mimic them. Any hints and tips in this area are appreciated

3. Convert

I try to publish the finished movie in as high resolution as possible to keep as reference. Then I use ffmpeg a somewhat complicated command line tool to convert between various formats. I use this to convert to flash movie format.

4. Publish

I use the flash movie to publish on our own site. And I upload the high resolution version to a number of sources like vimeo, youtube and wegame.

Thats about it. It's actually quite easy and fun to make a vid. The entire process for the twtpb vid took about 3h, I think that is plenty bang for the buck.

If you got any hints and tips or questions, feel free to comment.