Half Life: Alyx - Jeff - Update #4

Good evening all. Apologies, I was meant to do this update way earlier in the week.

I've been able to get to the near-end of the main edit for Half Life Alyx. With only some bits intentionally outstanding for reasons I'll expand upon in a moment.

Here's a shot of the current timeline from Adobe Premiere. The blue parts are the principle edit. About 26 minutes from the 3 hours of original livestream.

The dark purple bits are the After Effects compositions. Note the brighter purple segments. These are losslessly rendered .avi files to simplify the rendering process. I've still not been able to figure out that bug in my rendering that stops me from processing the .aep files. But at least it's an easy workaround with pre-rendering.

But also note the presence of a lot of blue. Meaning stuff that I didn't take into After Effects. Doing the text entirely in Premiere. An attempt to be as efficient as possible. Saving the visual effects for when they were really needed.

As a direct result, this edit is going much faster than it would be at 26 minutes for a traditional bullshittery.

Right now I'm really entering the quality assurance. Though admittedly I'm blurring lines of the process. There are definitely some major segments still to edit. I've not finished the job by any measure. But I can throw those in as CRITICAL bugs to ensure I prioritise that work.

I've put together another one of those tracking sheets to show people what I'm doing.

Honestly I find those quite helpful. It lets me be nice and transparent about what I'm doing at any given moment, it breaks down the remaining work into quantifiable chunks, it provides that feeling of making solid progress. But also motivates me to get a move on because I'm being watched.

So the most notable thing to talk about is the presence of 're-shoots' in this edit.

I often say in the livestreams, that I can't really do reshoots in a bullshittery. The livestreams were done and dusted, I can't recreate that moment. But that isn't always strictly true.

Sometimes I find myself doing a quick sneaky insert in some bullshittery or another. Usually in a situation where the visuals were so poor that it would ruin the scene otherwise.

The most notable one I can think of is this one from Arma 3:

That's not the original footage. It's the original audio yes. But it's not the original visuals.

 That's actually an NPC pretending to be Cyanide in that brief 10 second scene. Because the original footage frame rate was so crap. Probably something like 7 frames per second. Antistasi, with all its NPC's, sometimes ran like a fridge.

It seemed wiser to go into the editor, deck an NPC out in Cyanide's exact same clothing and have him run in that exact same spot. Rather than show an disgusting 7 frame slideshow. Who's going to notice, I figured.

And here in Half Life Alyx I have a similar situation. Not with frame rate. But with eyeline.

God damn do I seem to jerk my head around a lot.

Occasionally it's absolutely nauseating. Especially if there's a lot of text on the screen, or I need viewers to notice something important. But I won't stop scanning the area for danger.

In about 3 scenes so far (none of them longer than 6 seconds) I've decided to go back into VR and just keep my head still to let the viewers comprehend what I'm looking at.

Here's the first example. I'm showing the viewers the vodka factory right at the start of the video.

And here's the second example. It's a ladder with a mumbling voice coming from the top of it:

This is mostly for what would be coined establishing shots. Such as a building, a ladder, an elevator, etc. A place in the video where I need to communicate to the audience where I'm going next. And my head was moving around far too to make it useable without a huge amount of slow motion or freeze framing.

Lastly, there's a similar situation right at the end of the video. Which I've left unedited on purpose.

For I was so sufficiently dehydrated and stunned by the end of the level, that I legit took a short break to get food and water.

Meaning there's a major continuity problem between the end of Jeff and the opening of the hatch. I had to stop and explain the plot for the hundred odd new people who were joining.

I'm going to simply rerecord that bit to keep it simple. Speak to the NPC Larry (always the same cutscene), press the button to open the hatch, keep my original voice stuff, then just jump in and cut to black.

So long story short - quality assurance work has started and you can follow it here. But there's definitely some unedited chunks of the video to process.

Work on going!