SourceForts has been looking to attract new players to the mod for quite some time. It's difficult to do such a task when mid-versions as there is not much the team can use to justify a news post, so it was decided the best way to go about bringing in the new players was to beef up the upcoming 194 release.

A release of a game is split into three basic parts:

1. The hype. The game makes itself known and that it is almost ready to be released, and the community is 'teased' with information.
2. The release.
3. Post release, where the servers must be up and maintained and the news the mod has been released should be spread far and wide.

The trailer is an important part of our hype plan. It shows off the mod in a new light, pointing out clean new aesthetics and also helps to make the mod look professional. Our old trailer wasn't exactly much to write home about, but it got the job done and was responsible for a huge surge of new players into the game.

So how does one make a trailer? Many of you have probably seen machinima style videos, and think they don't look particuarly hard to reproduce. 'Just go into spectator mode and hit record' is the idea we got from them when we made the old trailer, and the flaws of that technique are glaringly obvious.

For example, the cameraman would often get shot or killed (the trailer was done pre-spectator mode). Pans were jerky and hard to control. When close to other players, the scripting on the player models made them turn their head and look at the camera (which in some ways was quite cool, but didn't help much.)

Watching again machinima and you see smooth camera movements along predefined paths and none of the problems we encountered. We must have done something wrong. Thus started my quest to learn how to machinima in less than a day.

Recording the demos

The first few shots are simply camera sweeps over maps, so nothing special was required there to see it happen. The time lapse shots in the middle are the interesting ones.

A group of beta players was gathered to make the demos happen, and we had three full matches over three maps. The best way to show building and how it evolves would be to show the viewer a large chunk of build phase, but this would be boring.

So I opted for some timelapse footage. By setting the AVI recorder (as will be explained later) to 1 frame per second, and having a very long, slow camera movement across the level, it lead to some wonderful timelapse footage with the camera moving in what seems to be real time and the players and walls going up in super speed.

The combat was all real, nothing was staged in the trailer, unlike our previous one. With the addition of the soon-to-be-explained demo tool, I could put the camera wherever the action was, instead of trying to make sure the action always happened infront of the camera.

Smoothing it out

When you want to record a source game to AVI, instead of using Fraps or one of the many other screen recorders, you get the best possible result by recording a demo, then using source itself to dump every frame to a .tga image. The key to camera movements lay in editing the demos, not trying to do it live when recording.

Source comes with a demo replay suite of tools, and the biggest and most useful for the movie-recording task is the smoothing tool. Here it is pictured below:

It is, by far, the most buggy tool I have ever used in Source. It became obvious early on that, when programming it, valve had listed out all the features they thought they needed, made the GUI but then only programmed the features they used.

What you can use it for though is defining camera positions, or keys, in a demo, and then making them spline together. First you set the start and end 'ticks' (which essentially equate to a type of frame), then you can set keys where you want and tell the program to calculate a smoothened route.

Once I got the hang of it, it didn't actually take too long to make up new movies, despite the software bugs. Of course, it did leave me with a nice mess of TGA files to contend with.

The Aftermath

The entirety of the recordings was shot in 720p high definition and at 20fps. The longest sequences were about 10 seconds long, which equates to 200 frames. Each TGA was around 2mb(!) in size, as Source engine applies the lowest possible compression. This lead to huge files of up to 400mb.

Using Virtual Dub was the best free way to turn these TGAs into an AVI. After the conversion, the AVIs actually turned out bigger than the TGA collection, sometimes reaching 500-600mb. Compression was not used, to allow maximum compatibility when it came to the editing section. With all the movies put together that made up the trailer in their uncompressed forms, it totals to over 8Gb of data!

Once the movies were converted, it was a quick trip over to my Mac OSX partition to splice them together.
Adding a soundtrack

A good trailer needs good music. The old trailer simply had a shortened version of the menu theme, but in all honesty it didn't work too well, so I composed a unique and simple track for the background music.

Using a combination of paddy swirls and light drums, it goes along well with the time lapse and also allows good syncing with the transisitions in the movie.

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http://www.stieffers.com/Other/SF_Signature_Khuskan.gif

Does that mean we have to wait moar. ><

The only reason we are waiting is the maps...wow go figure

The bugs we're trying to fix aren't bugs with the maps themselves as such, just bugs that effect two of the maps.

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God.

Making the old trailer was fun though We had lulz on vent back then
Cell suggesting that you should end the trailer with a griefer, making that a good realistic ending of a random SF game :P

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Great tutorial <333 And holy shit 400mb movie lol

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"I hope Draken and #'s will get picked up by communities that actually deserve them."

I made a machinima short once (nothing special, just a WoW human and emotes) and it was about 500mb in size. These movies are massive raw.

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Thanks for the post Khuskan, it's always interesting to read about this stuff.

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I love the track used in the trailer.

MY SKYFORT BRINGS ALL THE NOOBS TO THE YARD
MY SKYFORT
IS BETTER THAN YOURS

lolwut

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