I was busy last month cutting together a trailer for… business purposes. I’ll talk more about this later. It turned out surprisingly more difficult that I had have hoped, but I found a rather unique way of pulling it together.

Obviously, the secret weapon is Fraps. Trying to nab constant 60fps footage was doable, but proved tricky, due to my hard drives not being the most defragged. I don’t know how many takes later, I ended up with nearly an hour of game footage, that was cut down to a 4 minute presentation.

Then I found myself in Virtual Dub, non destructively clipping my clips down to size.

Did my usual thang in Audition, recording a nice, friendly, albeit rushed narrative for the presentation.

But then came the real trouble. Assembling.

Just about every app I tried had some huge problem. Avid, Premier, MS Movie Maker, T@B Zweistein, and a list of open source ones. If it wasn’t resolution limits, it was framerate caps, inability to read my files, etc.

In the end, I found a lovely, relatively unrestricted shareware program called, can you believe it, “Video Edit Magic”! And it was. Relatively stable (I didn’t lose anything the 1 time it crashed). Simple. And only $70. It was well worth it, certainly saving my butt.