The Art of the Overkill | Slayer Snail

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calling a video the art of the overkill and not using a/v synching / just putting clips behind each other on a timeline makes it very hard to create any excitement.

I know what each clips is gonna turn out to be multikill wise and I know there isnt gonna be any real flow to the video. That means either the clips have to be fucking insane or I really have to like the song. Which is just setting yourself up to come up short with a huge % of the people watching. 

It had some fun clips, but yeah I hope what I said above makes sense to ya

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Oh Im totally on board with showing a clip in full, I've been an advocate of that for a long time when you have the gameplay to do so. 

That doesnt mean you cant synch it up and make it flow. Not every synch requires cutting up clips, just good clip placement goes a long way. It's just making watching it more of an involving experience, why wouldnt you want that? There's a huge area between putting in eye candy, 3d text, masking every surface, cutting clips to shreds etc. (things that may distort/distract from the gameplay) and making a video work, they dont even have to have overlap.

Also it could be single, double and triple kills for all I care, as long as the clip is good and I dont know what its gonna be before hand. But you told me it was gonna be all killtacs, which makes it less exciting.. thats just how that works. 

Take Hyena's Blizzard of the Netherworld II as an example, very little cuts in the clips, but synched with the music. doesnt need to be sniper shots on every beat or crazy map transitions and 3d modeled spartans to synch audio and visual themes. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFCP2ASsfx4

​I'm not trying to tell you what to do, I'm definitely not telling you to get killionaires in social.. dunno where that came from. I'm just sharing my views as someone who's been in this halo video game for 10+ years and your comments above indicated you wanted feedback. 

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My way is way more specific than what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is more like.. the basic premise of what seems to work as a decent viewer experience for the general audience. Do with that what you want. The more originality the better, I'm not asking for cookie cutter anything so do you and see what works.

Anyways, I remember you. I fucking hated QsK King's editing lol so I wasnt on that train. That Reckon video was alright tho, it worked.

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Ah cool man, I'll be looking forward to it!

And yeah King's style was one thing, the sloppy masking just made it even worse to me. Not my cuppa tea, altho he did do a lot in the community at the time so I have respect for that. Cool to see you around, all the best man.

Oh I'm totally on board with showing a clip in full, I've been an advocate of that for a long time when you have the gameplay to do so. 

That doesn't mean you cant synch it up and make it flow. Not every synch requires cutting up clips, just good clip placement goes a long way. It's just making watching it more of an involving experience, why wouldn't you want that? There's a huge area between putting in eye candy, 3d text, masking every surface, cutting clips to shreds etc. (things that may distort/distract from the gameplay) and making a video work, they don't even have to have overlap.

Also it could be single, double and triple kills for all I care, as long as the clip is good and I don't know what its gonna be before hand. But you told me it was gonna be all killtacs, which makes it less exciting.. that's just how that works. 

Take Hyena's Blizzard of the Netherworld II as an example, very little cuts in the clips, but synched with the music. doesn't need to be sniper shots on every beat or crazy map transitions and 3d modeled spartans to synch audio and visual themes.

Excuse me?!

(Heh--my ears started burning, I couldn't resist. wink)

Alright man as someone who edited Halo on iMovie for a long time I can tell you that the software is perfectly adequate if you know your limitations and don't try to show off. This was pretty goddamn atrocious from the editing front tbh because you tried to do too much. It's iMovie dude, not sony vegas. Don't pretend it's sony vegas becauseThe gameplay was pretty cool, even though knowing it would be all overkills from the start was a little underwhelming. But I liked it! Lunchbox outBR was definitely cool and some of those overs were enjoyable to watch.

Normally I don't like to be too harsh on editing because a lot of things are kinda personal preference. But as someone who also edited on iMovie this just offends over and over. I literally cringed at 0:13 when I saw that stock background behind the text. Other timestamps that made me actually facepalm were 0:54, 1:47, 2:08,  2:39, 2:54, and 3:30 with the twinkly text.

I have my own style that happens to be pretty minimalist, with a lot of short crossfades and century gothic text for titles. I'm not saying yours has to be exactly the same way but when you slap way overdone stock effects on clips it just looks awful. I personally would suggest using cross fades instead of cross blurs since in 9/10 cases it just looks objectively smoother. Also ditch those pan and zoom shits, those are awful. Personally I prefer a slight color correction that's usually slightly increased saturation and by reducing both the shadows and highlights just by a couple percentage points. Not saying you need to copy me, just saying how I get a pleasant looking edit out of software as bare bones as iMovie. Ideally editing should enhance the impact of the video, but failing that, it should at least be easy on the eyes and not break the viewer's immersion in the gameplay. I'll put some of my own examples at the end of this post.

Take the heatwave or old world or whatever the fuck it is off the clip at 3:29. Built in iMovie effects are way too much for Halo. 1:00 looks like baby barf slapped over an otherwise fine H2A clip.

As far as syncing your clips with a song, it doesn't have to be a huge endeavor like slater said. Maybe just sync a few shots throughout the video with beats in the song. In general I've found that syncing on bass instead of snares works best, but the freedom to do what you want depending on the song is yours. It doesn't even have to be much, just 2 or 3 snipes on beats of the song. A good example for a video similar to this one would be Yeezy's H4 leftovers that I put together. I swear I only purposefully synced like 6 things in the whole video, and it was miles better than leaving the clips however. Whole video done in 1.5 hours or so (I did fuck up on the audio ending though, idk what the fuck that was so I admit I fucked up there.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3hEo8g83gs

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDD3VUhwVRM

 

​Also, maybe consider upgrading your capture card. Quality isn't even that important but framerate definitely is. Especially for a game where lots of montages are 60fps and the remainder are an unfaltering 30. 

Don't mean to be overly critical, dude. Just saying if you put a tiny extra effort into future videos they will come out much better :)

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