Half Life: Alyx - Jeff - Update #5

Now the video is out to Patrons, I'm delighted to go into much more detail about what I just did editing-wise. So...Half Life: Alyx. That was fun but very challenging.

Here's a shot of the final timeline:

Being a VR title, it inherently came with the quirks of that particular format. These things I knew going in, of course. Having experienced similar editing VR Pavlov:

• There's a lot of motion to compensate for with keyframing. Including rotational motion as I turn my head. Something you don't really get in most other games.

• There are fewer opportunities for automated tracking.

• There are geometrically complicated foreground elements (such as gun shapes) that do not at all stay in one consistent size. Which can necessitate very complicated masking.

And each of these challenges had to be faced scene by scene, once the initial cutting had been completed.

One major structural decision I made early was the decision to start slow and then build up. Intentionally having some nice ambience exploration to simply drink in the setting of the vodka factory.

My goal here was to aim for tone, letting that piano soundtrack build it up before things became tense.

This is notable because the area at the start features THREE highly energetic fight sequences against The Combine. Well within the context of this video scope. And therefore logically they would normally be included.

There was even a joke I left on the cutting room floor when Russell made me jump with a drone.

But...including all that would mean I'd need to show it being shot down to explain its absence. And if I did that, I'd need to show what happened to The Combine who shot it down.

Meaning the initial cut was all far too energy. With lots of shooting and explosions. I felt the need to tone it down and go for a slow opening. Just hit a lever and start working on ambience.

Another challenge was the presence of lots of background tracks.

This is something of an editing pet-peeve. I can't imagine most people would care. But the act of heavy cutting - especially heavy dialogue cutting - often causes an audio track to noticeably skip. To the point that it can sound terrible if the track has lots of music that's meant to play consistently in the background. Notes that hold for lengthy periods such as is common in ambience music.

Half Life Alyx has a lot of that.

For example, Xenfestation Control -

https://youtu.be/TMjR6hE6nDs?list=PLUAt2grZMdomRBA52R0qhwU2VZhfa9TPy&t=59

Or Sunset Vault - 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkwSvERxdj4

Both of which were trying to set a tone. And sounded horrible when mangled by repeatedly skipping.

On the former, I had to simply be careful where possible. To shimmy the game audio left and right so that the cutting of the piano notes wasn't too egregious.

On the latter, I flat out replaced all in game audio outside the vodka factory. Downloading the store bought soundtrack and placing Sunset Vault, uncut, in order to play it with a simple fade in and out.

Note the lack of original in game audio on the layer there. I went into the game and made my own custom replacement audio as a sort of B-roll. The sound of the wind, the crickets, the Combine machines opening. All to keep the Sunset Vault track out of the background noise to let it play independently.

Even at the end, before the next level, there's supposed to be this track playing as you look into the tunnel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4egEahk2ac&list=PLUAt2grZMdomRBA52R0qhwU2VZhfa9TPy&index=54

But I decided it was a little too ominous for what was meant to be a fade out to a splash screen. So I replaced it with ambient sounds from a future level. The bit where you're standing below the final Vault with the wind quietly blowing in the night sky.

Essentially it's an example of the philopshy that I have when bullshittery editing. I need to try and present a Youtube video that's smooth to watch. Not necessary a 100% recounting of the livestream.

The next important challenge is something I dub eyeline during quality assurance.

Essentially the acknowledgment that the viewer will only ever have one set of eyes and can only look in one place. Therefore I need to be careful to not have too many things going in any frame, in order to overwhelm them.

Unless of course that busy frame is part of the joke.

And on that front, regular viewers would know that I repeatedly describe the use of Null Objects.

These are the invisible squares that I parent text to. A default feature of After Effects. And its on those invisible squares that the properties are all assigned (position, scaling, rotation, etc).

Here's one tracking a bottle:

In addition to these Null Objects, I like to assign at least one 'Null Controller'.  A null upon which all other Nulls are parented.

This lets me do mechanically simple things that are extrapolated outwards. Such as zooming the frame, or moving it around. Safe in the knowledge that I can keep altering all other Nulls or text, without screwing up.

This is relevant for eyeline, because there were many moments of 'competing eyeline' in this video. Moments where Jeff was doing something action-packed in the middle of the screen. And yet placing text there would have led to an unsatisfying viewing experience where you can't look in two places.

Here's an example before I changed it. Text at the top and text at the bottom. Can't read all of it smoothly. Especially if there are great big sentences on both top and bottom.

So in these situations, I just zoomed in. Had the Null Controller take over as the focus of the scene. Here's an example here. My speaking voice isn't relevant and is competing with the Vault in the sky. So why not just tell the Null Controller to zoom into the vault?

Additionally, sometimes I would have the text at the base of the screen simply slide away. Placing a couple of position keyframes down, so that as the VR frame moves up, the text goes with it. Trying to predict where the viewers eyeline is going to be.

It's the sort of thing you appreciate in repeat viewing. Taking the test renders and watching them through several times to figure out where your eyeline is. Working through them until the video starts to seem smoother and smoother.

Your 5th or 6th render starting to seem more natural. As the action is starting to correspond to where the viewer is probably looking.

The goal isn't to put text on everything. It is a focusing mechanism for what matters.

When it came to the in game characters, I decided to go with a Verdana in Bold font. Having briefly experimented with other styles. Only to discover that a slightly modified Verdana is...weirdly enough...the font that Half Life uses.

That was an amusing discovery. Like that realisation that Avatar just uses bog-standard Papyrus.

Half Life is using Verdana? Lol

Once again I decided to use the Pixel Polly effect. This time for the shattering of the various bottles of vodka around the factory.

Pixel Polly simply takes your text and shatters it into pieces at a pre-set time interval. From there it includes settings for the number of pieces, the direction they should go, the force of the shattering, etc.

It is in my opinion, an excellent little tool that greatly simplifies the process of making text break apart.

The masking job - the act of cutting shapes out of objects that should be in the foreground to make the text fly behind it - was extremely challenging for this video. Geometrically complex doesn't begin to describe it.

Comprehend my pain!!

This was, probably without exaggeration, the most painful project for masking I've ever done.

Whenever I placed my hands up in front of something it was very tricky to work around. Necessitating frame by frame masking of multiple points of tracking with a slight feather effect to make it blend in.

Aforementioned posts have mentioned my habit of duplicating the footage and then locking it to the highest possible layer in the scene. Then cutting shapes out of that rather than cutting shapes out of the text. This has the advantage of being able to change the text size and shape later (or even replacing the sentences entirely) and still having the mask be valid.

Freezer for example can be anything. The mask will still block it.

It's a balancing act of identifying what would be worthwhile to mask and what would be time wasting.

I thought it would be cool to have the text 'RAZORTRAIN' shoot past the window in time with the actual Combine razor-train. But I scrapped the idea after some brief testing. There are SO many little gaps in that window that it would take days to look good.

So masking can look great, so long as it's practical within time constraints.

Additionally, there were times where the VR motion became far too much. Trouble with automated tracking is that it's dumb as a rock. It'll translate every single little motion into the text. This was the case with this door lock for example. Super jittery because my head is being jittery.

So one solution was to simply zoom in the null controller and stabilise the footage.

I pull this trick a few times. You'll spot them through the video.

But of course, the other solution was something much more drastic. Minor reshoots.

There are times throughout the video where I deemed the motion FAR too problematic in the original footage. So I snuck in a few seconds of re-shot footage to better establish what is going on. Especially if I needed to establish the location of the next scene.

Observe the difference. And the amount of crazy motion in the original footage that made me deem it unacceptable.

In no particular order:

1.) The outside of the vodka factory when communicating the need to go through it:

2.) The pointing out of an overhead path into the upper part of the vodka factory. So it's clear where we go next.

3.) The pointing out of that window as the next place I need to go. Holding on it for an extra second so it's clear where the next scene is taking place.

4.) The pointing out of the door, as where I need to go next after the elevator:

5.) Larry's muffled voice coming from up this ladder, during the initial exploration:

6.) And the aforementioned falling to my knees. To communicate that I'm no longer standing up. For consider that I can't see through the headset. It's solid plastic. Meaning in order to look down, I instead need to point the headset up at the ceiling and look down my nose. Meaning the viewers would have no idea I was taking a knee.

These little connective shots, whilst a tiny part of the overall footage, collectively helping it all slot together. Providing establishing shots for the next scenes. And were in my opinion, a worthwhile addition.

Weirdly though, I wonder if they did something to the shadows in the time since I've played? I don't believe I've tweaked the settings. But for some reason the dark areas of the game were considerably darker in the newer reshot footage. Necessitating washing out of the new footage slightly with an 8% brightness tweak.

Hopefully nobody will notice.

Ultimately when it came to the quality assurance work, there ended up being 360+ issues to resolve. A mighty beast. Issues mostly came from eyeline rework. But also keyframe smoothing. And especially consistency issues between the text presentation between After Effects and Premiere.

A lesson for the future to be sure. I need to make sure the two programs have templates which are absolutely identical before I begin. Lest weird inconsistencies appear in the text positions in the final render.

And lastly, I had a bit of fun with the ending.

For whilst initial cuts had me simply fade out to black, I had time to recreate the Alyx font as a custom After Effects composition.

• I made a simple black background.

• The Half Life text is just Verdana in bold with an opacity transition into the scene.

• Each letter is a separate shape layer. A drawn line with the pen tool.

• I've set a couple of keyframes to pull a 'stroke' border along the shape at a pre-set speed.

• The stroke has a thickness value which starts at 0.1 and then climbs to 10.

• And the whole thing is parented to a Null Controller square in the middle, which increases in scale to make a zooming effect

Voila. A little outro. Editing is fun!

Hope you like the video. Will put up some polls for the next one shortly. As the next bullshittery is your choice . Thank you as always folks for your extremely patronage all. I hugely appreciate it!