dev diary: trailer process (Patreon)

last week i put up the steam trailer for her tears were my light, so i figured i'd take the time this week to talk about how i do videos! 

this was the first trailer i made all on my own (the previous ones i always hired someone to help me lol). i used OBS studio to capture my footage, and put it together in after effects cs6. definitely not a recommended workflow, it's just a program i'm pretty familiar with by now haha (i actually had a class for it during college! that's honestly the only reason i know how to use it...)

mostly the thing i like about AE is the text animation... like i got to add cool blurs when my text dissolves in hehe

but see, if i was a smarty and used premiere or vegas, i could cut the footage together properly instead of having this wild stack of layers and dissolving black over them lmao

you also have to do a RAM preview every time you want to hear the audio to check if your animation/cutting is timed well (in this case i faded after each line of the song)--which just means, my computer was really chuggin as it rendered the next few seconds of the video at 1/3 resolution... yeah i think im just gonna try using premiere next time and cross my fingers that i can figure out the export settings (video stuff is so insanely complicated!!!!)

anyway, it only took a few hours to put all this together! having the song made it very easy to figure out what footage should go where. i just matched it up with the lyrics :) anything that i couldn't demonstrate very well with footage, i put into text (like the fact that it's a timeloop story). i think the only trouble i ran into was the section of photo studio footage at the end being slightly too short for what i wanted, but i stretched it to 99% or whatever and then it worked perfectly! glad i remembered the weird time interpolation stuff this program can do... otherwise i would've had to go and rerecord lol.

btw, the astra's garden trailer was put together in an opensource program called shotcut, which is a lot closer to premiere... but the text animation tools are really clunky to use, AND don't have subpixel animation!!!!!!!! so the text for the htwml trailer is much smoother... it's really such a small thing, but i like my stuff to look polished. simple! but polished.

that's all for now~ next time i'll share a sneak peek of the photo studio since i'm finishing the art for that this week. see you then!