Capturing Great Footage for Game Trailers

• Talk: "Capturing Great Footage for Game Trailers", GDC.
• Speaker: Derek Lieu, trailer editor (Whisper writes "Derek Liu"; the talk's own credits are Firewatch, Dead Cells, Subnautica, Tacoma, Ooblets and others).
• Year: not stated. Probably 2018 (inferred, not checked): he is still cutting The Adventure Pals, Ooblets is unreleased, a GIF maker he follows is busy with Monster Hunter, and he dates the Mad Max game to 2015.
• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVeihUFtEkg

Names that are probably mistranscribed: "Kurt Gartner" (a fellow trailer maker), "Scott Goodrow" (The Wild Eternal), "AtSoonHeLegend" (a GIF account), "Octageddon" and "Wajidai's Unavowed" (Wadjet Eye's Unavowed).

What the talk teaches

1. Footage reaches more people than the game. Released capture is the only time the developer controls how the game looks; good capture communicates, so a shot nobody can read is a failed shot.
2. Four factors set how hard a game is to capture: visual feedback, camera distance, number of objects on screen and the audience's familiarity. Far cameras with many objects need a way to create focus.
3. Capture is filmmaking, not playing: the capture artist directs, operates the camera and puppets the character. Composition (centre or rule of thirds, eye trace across cuts), readability ("Squint at your shots to check their readability"; one idea per shot, remove extra enemies, zoom in) and performance (how the character moves is character).
4. Debug tools for capture, the essentials: switch off the HUD, on-screen text and especially button prompts (with them a cross-platform game is captured once per platform); a music toggle, because music mixed into the capture makes its sound effects unusable; level skip, teleport with a position display, a level number on screen, item and enemy spawning, invincibility, a fast mode, a "tourist mode" past enemies, cursor and object-highlight toggles, time of day.
5. A free camera, tuned for smooth movement rather than precision: adjustable speed by hotkeys or sliders, not console values; dead zones; input smoothing (averaged over time); a stick curve gentle near the centre; up and down on the triggers. First person adds a head-bob toggle; third person a camera that follows the player at an offset, can be detached, and a player-visibility toggle. A second controller as the camera helps (Mad Max's video mode).
6. Time: a button that freezes the action while the camera moves, for new angles and match cuts. Slow motion helps perform a sequence but misrepresents a game without it; "If adding options for multiple time scales, just whole numbers are better", so the editor can restore normal speed exactly.
7. Also: VR capture tips, practice games, capture hardware and software, and (in Q&A) trailers of 90 seconds or less.

What the kit took

• .agents/skills/debug-tools/SKILL.md, section 7 "Capture mode": a debug-only --capture= flag (nohud, nomusic, nocursor, freeze, timescale=N or 1/N, whole numbers only) in a C# autoload, F6 and F7 to toggle the HUD and the freeze at run time, the free-camera requirements and a C# FreeCamera (smoothing, dead zone from the Input Map, a stick curve, speeds on keys 1 to 5, triggers for height, real time while frozen or scaled).
• .agents/skills/store-page/SKILL.md: the trailer bullet points to it; store screenshots keep the UI.
• tests/capture-fixture (the skill's two C# files verbatim, a HUD layer and a world-space prompt in group hud, Music and SFX buses, a probe) and tests/Test-Capture.ps1, run in the self-test workflow's measure job under Xvfb. It also checks that the skill quotes the fixture's files exactly.
• Kit additions, not the talk's: the autoload raises Engine.PhysicsTicksPerSecond with the time scale so physics keeps its step; unknown modes fail the run (engine-errors), which catches typos.

Measured (pwsh tests/Test-Capture.ps1, Godot 4.7.2 mono, Xvfb, 640x360)

Not taken, and doubts

• Composition, readability and performance advice, hardware, editing software and VR tips: editorial craft that no check can enforce. The store-page skill's trailer rules cover what a page needs.
• Level skip, teleport, spawning, invincibility and the rest of point 4 are listed as flags for section 2 of the skill, not implemented: each depends on the game.
• Head bob, third-person follow and detach, player visibility, a second controller as camera and 2D zoom: described, not coded; they depend on the game's own camera and controls.
• Hiding the HUD every frame can let a node shown by a timer or tween callback flash for one frame (those run after _Process); the skill puts the group on CanvasLayers to avoid it. Not measured.