Trailer Talk...

Good Afternoon Everyone!

 I hope everyone is doing well! Hopefully by now you have had a chance to see the trailer. I hope you enjoyed it, it is just a brief taste of the story and we have plans to show much more soon (without being spoilery) A special thank you to anyone that also shared it with others as well. You guys are the difference makers! Word of mouth is the best advertising we have at this point! :)

As a first timer doing this type of work I thought it might be interesting to post what my experience was like, what I learned, and tips and tricks I noted in my head for the future. To start I was using an open source window or monitor capture tool called open broadcaster. This was a really simple program to use. At first the only thing I was worried about was that the specs of my lap top were not powerful enough to run the game and simultaneously capture the game in real time. Luckily though that part of it worked out just fine. What I didn't realize until after I recorded the roughly 40 minutes of footage I needed was the my head phone microphone was recording the whole time, so there was a lot of background TV noise! Luckily, in this instance, I already knew I was going to be muting the game sound and just playing a song over it. So slight bullet dodged there and lesson learned there for the future. What I didn't realize is that it saved as a flash file. So now it was onto finding a video converter. I need to see if it can just save as an MP4 but it was too late at that point.

Enter Any Video Converter. I was in a rush so I loaded up my file and hit convert. When I was able to come back to see how it came out, what I was expecting was just a direct transfer at the same resolution and same frame per second. Instead it defaulted to 1080p at 24fps. For those that are unfamiliar, 1080p at 24fps is what a Blu Ray is encoded at and is generally a film resolution. Games in general run at many different resolutions and at a higher frame rate. The RPG Maker Engine that we were using renders at 544x416. Quite an odd resolution. But the screen the Master footage was captured from was 720p so I went into the settings and set to encode at 720p at 30fps. Finally I had my Master file about 40 Minutes long ready to edited.

Rob and I were first trying to use an editing program called lightworks, a very powerful open source tool said to be used by professionals. There were so many options and tools included that it actually became too much for us. I think this program really needs a nice multimonitor set up and not a single laptops with two adults and baby huddled around. It took us about 4 hours to get maybe 46 seconds of footage down and then since there were so many windows on top of windows on top of windows, we clicked in one wrong place and lost all our progress. Bummer. We had a slightly different intro but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort to go back and recreate it in the end. We really wanted the trailer last weekend. One major hangup in my opinion was the single long video versus several individual scenes.

Incoming Trimming tool! avidemux. Another a very easy to use tool for trimming your video files. It was as simple as watching my converted video, pausing where I wanted to copy out a scene, setting the time stamp, playing to where I wanted the scene to end, and then using the tools to advance and reverse the section of movie frame by frame until you have the perfect cut then doing a "save as". This will cause issues later which I will go into detail later. Another funny note, this was now saving my files as MKV Files. Another Video Conversion.

Now I had roughly 24-26 scenes adding up to close to 8 minutes of footage. I had decided that despite knowing that lightworks being a more powerful tool, I was going to use Windows Movie Maker for the sake of user friendliness and being able to deliver the trailer over the weekend like I really wanted to. There are some things that WMM can't do as far as I know that lightworks could but, I was determined and just worked my way around that. So the work continued! The scenes that were imported were arraigned to tell a story and more trimming took place. The final time after adding title cards and credits was very close to 5 minutes on the dot. This was the first draft of the trailer. After showing it to a people, there were a few pieces of feedback. One being that some of dialog went by too fast. So I slowed those down. Here is where I complain. WMM has 9 speed up options and only 3 slow down scene speed options. So if you noticed that some dialog heavy scenes characters may look like they are moving extra slow, that is because I had to slow them down to my only option of .5 speed. I feel .75 would have been a better option but I digress. Another note was that one scene in particular went on to long so I halved that. In what will become apparent later there was a large dungeon section that was cut for reasons to be revealed in the future. The irony that after all these trimmed up and cut scenes, because I had to slow down the dialog heavy scenes the trailer ended up being longer by about 16 seconds. Oh, remember how I mentioned about being careful with your initial trimming? Well certain fades between scenes were majorly cutting into visuals I wanted to show because I trimmed it so close. So as a trailer cutting pro tip. Give your self a few seconds on each end of the scene. You can always trim it up more later and then you wont have to worry about the fades or get told it looks like a karaoke machine! :)

Then it came time to add the music. Since there is not really a single piece of music that captured the essence that I was looking for perfectly I had to chop that up from royalty free music with open source programs as well using Free MP3 cutter and editor. This was a pretty basic program. As I understand it there are more powerful tools, but I loved its simplicity. If a program does all I need it to do I don't need the bells and whistles. The music timing isn't perfect, though the plan always was to have it fade out around then, but I was pretty satisfied. I pray for a day I can contract a composer!

So recut, and remastered, I set up my preferences for video out put bitrate for video and audio etc. And guess what, we are converting back to MP4, I know mkv and mp4 are very similar I just had a chuckle but, it did make if it was just me and eyes from looking at the same thing for too long, but to me the video has a slight touch of blur which isn't there when actually played. If that is the case I attribute it to all the converting and will see what can be done in the future.

Well, that's how the trailer came together. I feel like if I could make a metaphor this would be like the retelling of The Odyssey!

Have a great week everyone. Can't wait to share some of the other ideas Rob and I have come up with for future content here.

Best,

JP

PS

Oh, one last thought, in what possibly is the worst thing that could have happened, my stupid wireless mouse broke about 3/4ths into editing it all so I had to finish it with an awful touch pad! Funny now, awful then.! :)