An editing test that turned into one of my most obsessive projects.
Made in 65 segments and edited using Sony Vegas.
Please watch the 60FPS version as well, where the fruit of my efforts is best noticeable.
The speedrun itself is “meh”, at best. Poorly performed and I barely gave a fuck about it. Why do I say this? well I spend only 23 hours making this run, but I spent roughly 140 hours on editing the video. I spent two entire nights awoke making this.
I didn’t make this video just for the speedrun, **I made this because I tried my hardest to learn how to avoid audio/video cut-offs when transitioning between segments. **
An ideal Half-Life segmented-speedrun movie should look like a Single-segment one, with no transitions/cut-offs in sight, but sadly I didn’t succeed, because:
-
I used a flawed save script that was prone to causing view-angle shifting before starting to record.
-
There are two places where the audio is desynchronized due to mistakes while trimming the audio samples.
-
The “turned on flashlight” sprite that I masked in the HUD is completely static. I could have fixed it by recording myself with the flashlight turned on for a few minutes and masking the clip above the HUD, but by the time I realized this the run was already uploaded.
-
The crosshair disappears during chapter changes because I removed the original chapter titles which were in the center of the screen.
Images of the Vegas project and some information on them and my suffering below:
[spoiler][center]
[/center]I handled every viewmodel glitch (in playdemo there’s always one frame that has a missing viewmodel, at least for me) by recording the first frames of demos with only the viewmodel visible and then chroma-keying them, I recorded some entire clips with their viewmodel separate to fix two weapon ‘draw’ animations when switching to them that were cut out in order to make the transition not obvious.
I masked and fixed the flashlight icon resetting on transitions using a BMP file, and thus it’s static for the rest of the chapter.
I also removed the Green barney’s (aka “Joe” in the game files) speech and re-added it to make it louder, which is why you won’t see him move his mouth at all.
I added music and the full HEV log-on speech because I can. :^)[center]
[/center]I hated editing this chapter because I had issues with the Chroma Key FX, because it removed all the shades of green in my revolver, which made it look awfully purple and hideous. I managed to circunvent this issue using the Secondary Color Corrector, to remove the pure green which worked beautifully, except that I had to turn off anti-aliasing for it to work ;_;
I originally used playdemo, but I was forced to re-record thanks to the issue above (before discovering the SCC thingy). Afterwards, I found out that viewdemo doesn’t cut off the viewmodel at the very beginning of the demo and it works pretty smooth, but it has some exceptions and replaces the viewmodel with another.
I learned while making this one that recording the sounds separately using viewdemo is by far the best way to fix audio cut-offs, because viewdemo doesn’t disconnect you from the game when the demo ends. After learning this I fixed a few audio transitions in the previous project, which originally had a few cut-offs that I couldn’t fix.
After learning the power of viewdemo, I hated this chapter even more because apparently HLAE is very prone to crashing after demo playback on viewdemo.
[center]
[/center]I used only playdemo this time because of the issue above with viewdemo and it was already pissing me off.
From segment 48 onwards the demos are glitched and thus I had to record the viewmodel separately using fov 120. 
I also discovered the magic of parent/child compositing, and unlike in the previous projects, I used a solid color to mask out the flashlight so I didn’t have to mask every single HUD stream manually.
[/spoiler]
All in all, it was very stressful to make this but I learned so much during it, after all that was the purpose of this, education.
Enjoy. Arianon out.
