Halo Pre-production scrubbing

Good morning all. At the end of last week, having had enough relaxation over Christmas, I decided to make a start on editing.

As the next game is my choice, I've started going through and reviewing the Halo: Master Chief collection stream footage in order to build a master project file. The first phase necessary for any bullshittery.

For those unfamiliar with my process, the master project file is essentially a bucket of clips. And I sift through that bucket to assemble a reel of highlights.

Every game I edit has one. And their content varies depending on how many streams there were. Or how comedic everyone was being at the time. And also how much time I have to sift through everything before I go to the editing.

I'm currently building Halo's bucket.

Functionally, this involves going through .txt files that look like this. Blank timestamps recorded by the plugin INFOWRITER. Stored alongside the full mp4 files. Recording a timestamp whenever I smacked a button on my stream deck.

I'm considering even getting a little pedal under my desk.

And from there my job is to go through and be selective. Discarding anything that doesn't seem relevant or amusing. And giving appropriate clip names to everything that is of use to me.

Your average bullshittery consists of about 40 ish clips. So the more clips I have to play with the better.

Some observations so far.

The Halo highlights are very quick and energetic. Usually consisting of rapid pace moments where the setup and payoff occurs within the same 10 seconds. There are very few discussions or scenarios of situational comedy, outside of some specific mini-games.

The footage is also LOUD. Very loud actually. There's so much screaming.

It's entirely guys, no women whatsoever, drinking alcohol and playing Halo on a weekend. So there's a lot of very rapid clips with lots of yelling. Practically this means that any bullshittery rough cut would consist of more than the usual 40 clips. And you can expect something very rapid fire in clip delivery.

Additionally, this Halo bucket would consist of many different individual games in the series. Therefore I've taken the preemptive step to separate clips from cooperative or multiplayer. Though I see no reason not to sprinkle them together in a compilation. It's all Halo, after all.

I'm even thinking of marking them by the level they took place on. Chain clips together that took place on 'Blood Gulch', 'Valhalla', 'Ice Fields', etc. Keeping a consistent colour pallet if the frame is going to move so rapidly.

Another thing to note is that there are 3-4 streams marked as requiring a full 'scrub'. This is when I've marked an entire stream as worthy of watch through for highlights. For reasons that I deemed necessary on the night.

Probably because we kept using a recurring gag and there's no way you can mark all of those moments with a plugin. Since you don't know something is going to become recurring in the moment.

Similarly there are also a few dedicated forge mini-games such as hide and seek marked as requiring scrubbing. So I'll need to spend a few hours going through a few streams in their entirity.

It's very normal pre-production work.

Estimated timeframe for completion is currently unknown. Viability for a decent bullshittery is also unknown. I'll know closer to the end of the week/start of next week. But thus far everything is going smoothly.

Hope you've all had a lovely new year :)