Creating a game video

Yesterday I decided to create a little teaser video for Ice Trap, showing off different ways of dying in the game. I believe that failing in a game should be almost as fun as playing it, so I try to put some extra attention and details into that part of my games.

Being primarily a programmer, my expertise when it comes to video editing is - to put it nicely - very limited. I had a clear idea what I wanted to achieve, but no clue which tools to use. Also, my tight budget limits me to use free or very inexpensive tools which heavily reduces the number of available options.

What I wanted to do was:

1. Record some actual gameplay sessions where I fail in different ways
2. Trim each session to only a couple of seconds
3. Crop each session, zooming in on the area where the actual dying is going on
4. Compile all the short clips into a single video file
5. Add some sound effects
6. Convert the video file to an animated gif

I won't go in to details about all the different approaches I tried. Instead I'll just skip directly to how I solved everything and talk a little bit about the tools I used.

1. Gameplay recording: iPad+QuickTime (Free, Mac).
   
   I can't say I'm a big fan of working on Mac, and I honestly prefer PC (Windows) over Mac almost always. But when it comes to screen recording I haven't been able to find a single free Windows tool that comes anywhere near the simplicity and quality that QuickTime brings. Just plug your iOS device in, start recording, and then save your video to a .mov file.
   
   
2. Trimming: Avidemux (http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/, Free, Windows)
   
   After some googling and trying out a couple of different tools that didn't meet my requirements, I landed on Avidemux. It does not look good and it's definitely not user friendly, but it gets the job done. And it's free. Just specify point A and B where you want your clip to start and end, and that should be it.
   
   
3. Cropping: Avidemux
   
   Avidemux was the first tool I found to provide a crop function at all. However, the crop filter available in Avidemux is about as poorly designed as I can possibly think of. Instead of specifying a target size and just position a region, you need to enter the number of pixels for the left, right, top and bottom margins manually. Yikes, that's not sweet at all, but in the end it works.
   
   A note on saving your trimmed and cropped videos from Avidemux, is that it's not very clear to me how to do this the best way. I ended up just selecting the Mpeg4 AVC (x264) video codec and then saving the video. The end result looked good to me, but it might have been better to use some other options.
   
   
4. Compiling clips into a single video file: Windows Live Movie Maker (Free)
   
   Windows Live Movie Maker is quite limited in functionality, but when it comes to putting together clips and images into a single video file it's pretty nice to work with. Just insert you clips into your project, arrange them in whichever order your like and add some transitions between the clips if you want to. The number of transitions to choose from, and the simplicity to preview and apply them, is is one of the strong sides of Movie Maker in my opinion.
   
   
5. Adding sound: Windows Live Movie Maker
   
   Well, this is actually not a very good choice since Movie Maker only allows you to add a single audio track to your video. But as long as you don't need any music or overlapping sound effects ,you can just use the single audio track for your sound effects. This is how I did it, but I'll probably need to look into other tools for upcoming videos since I'd prefer to be able to also have a background music track.
   
   When you're done you can just save your movie in any of several supported formats, and you're done with the video.
   
   
6. Converting to animated gif: www.zamzar.com
   
   This was the first online conversion tool that I tested out that also managed to convert my video file into an animated gif of decent quality. Only downside was that it took a little while, half an hour or so, before my gif was ready for download.
   
   I also had a brief look at the popular command line tool ffmpeg, but I didn't manage to find a single complete example that could convert my video into a gif without noticeable loss of quality. I'm pretty sure that ffmpeg is a pretty great tool, but at the moment I don't want to spend time learning it unless I have to.
   

Here's what the final video looks like, with some branding added at the beginning and end:

And here's the animated gif:

I'm pretty happy with the end result. It took me a few hours to put all the pieces together, but now that I know which tools to use the next video will probably be a lot quicker.