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(1 edit)

I'd like to put in a good word for Shotcut. (It's also good for making gameplay gifs, though you will need separate screen capture software)

I think that while WarpZone's advice mostly holds, that your trailer could be mostly gameplay footage, but probably in clips of no more than three seconds, showing off important gameplay features or particularly pretty scenes. Then intercut that with some text on a black background. You can get a lot of milage out of that.

I use OBS to capture gameplay, it's fiddly, but has the good features and plays nice with my hardware.

And if you want some free music for your trailer, CCMixter has a huge collection of it.

Shotcut is good to start but you should move on to something more professionnal as soon as you have the chance IMO. The many problems I had are:

  • Blur lagging so much I had to export the entire video to see how it looks like
  • Font border gets ugly for more than 5 px
  • Audio desync present in the video preview of the software but not in the export
  • Impossible to move groups of clips, so you need to export parts of the video to be able to move it as one block
  • Various crashes, although the recover feature is nice

Here's the result, if you are wondering: 

I got a lot of inspiration from https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-make-an-indie-game-trailer... I hope it shows in my trailer! Overall shotcut can do nice things but at some point you need to switch. I'm not sure what I should switch to!