How to cut a horror trailer from your own gameplay

Last updated 2026-08-24 · 7 min read

What is the short version?

A trailer is not a highlight reel, and the two need almost entirely different footage. Highlights show you winning and a trailer withholds, which means the material it is built from is the empty corridor before the monster rather than the monster itself.

1. Go to Vizard Agent and upload your recordings.
2. Say the tone — dark and moody, epic, minimal.
3. Say the length and what the trailer is for.

What do you need before you start?

The recordings and a register. Vizard Agent reviews the footage and finds the atmospheric moments itself, so you do not need to mark anything, and naming the tone precisely matters because it drives the music, the grade and the cutting rhythm together.

• The recordings. Several sessions gives more to choose from.
• The tone. Dark and moody, epic, minimal.
• The length. Thirty to forty seconds.
• Title text. For the cards, if you want them.
• The shape. Widescreen suits a trailer; vertical is available.

What do you type into Vizard Agent?

Name the register in the same breath as the format. Vizard Agent uses that word to generate the soundtrack, choose the grade and set how long each shot holds, so "dark and moody" and "epic" produce genuinely different films from identical footage.

Prompt

Variants worth knowing:

• Generated soundtrack. Rather than a licensed track, matched to the cut.
• Jumpscare sound design. Placed on the cuts rather than under them.
• Serif title cards. They read as cinema rather than as gaming.

What does Vizard Agent actually do?

Here is the order Vizard Agent worked in on a real horror trailer. Notice how much of it is looking closely at specific moments — the handprints, the shrine, the ritual circle — rather than at the action everyone would pick.

1. Downloads the recordings and builds contact sheets for each one.
2. Checks the audio levels and whether there is any dialogue to work around.
3. Extracts detailed frames from the key moments and reviews each scene individually.
4. Inspects the atmospheric details closely — the handprints, the shrine, the ritual circle, the blood room.
5. Searches for horror trailer music, then generates a custom soundtrack instead.
6. Analyses the soundtrack's energy progression and cue points and its musical structure.
7. Generates a second background track and compares the two energy curves before choosing.
8. Compiles a shot review sheet of every candidate and reviews them together.
9. Renders serif title cards, tests the cinematic crop and grade on sample frames, generates the jumpscare effects, assembles to the music cues, calibrates the loudness and checks the waveform on the final master.

Step 7 is the one worth copying. Two soundtracks can suit a trailer equally well in the abstract and behave completely differently across thirty seconds, and comparing their energy curves tells you which one has the shape your footage needs.

What does the result look like?

From the run this page is written from, probed on the delivered file: 1920x1080, H.264, 30fps, 37.5 seconds, AAC audio. Widescreen, thirty-seven seconds, graded to a cinematic look with serif title cards, a generated soundtrack and sound design placed on the cuts.

Thirty-seven seconds is the standard trailer shape, and it is not accidental. Vizard Agent builds to the music's cue points, so the length follows the track's structure rather than a round number somebody picked.

When does this not work well?

A trailer cut from gameplay is bound both by what the game itself looks like and by who actually owns it, and neither of those is something an edit can work around. Vizard Agent grades and paces the footage well, and those two constraints stay exactly where they are.

• The game is someone else's work. Check what the publisher permits for promotional cuts.
• Interface elements are in the frame. Health bars and prompts read as gameplay, not cinema.
• A grade cannot hide a low frame rate. Stuttering footage stays stuttering.
• Withholding needs material. If every clip is action, there is nothing to build tension from.
• Horror depends on sound. A trailer watched muted loses most of its effect.

How do you fix a result that came back wrong?

Name the shot or the beat. Vizard Agent keeps the shot review sheet, both soundtracks with their energy curves, the graded samples and the title cards, so a re-cut or a different track is a re-render against work it already did.

• "Use the other soundtrack." Its energy curve is already analysed; the cut re-times.
• "Show the monster later." Re-ordered against the music's cue points.
• "The grade is too dark." Retested on sample frames before re-rendering.

How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?

By hand this means scrubbing hours of recordings for the atmospheric shots, which is harder than finding the action ones because nothing marks them. Then a track gets dropped underneath and the cuts land wherever they land, which is the difference between a trailer that builds and one that is just dark clips in a row.

Common questions

Does this work for other genres? Yes. The method transfers to a racing game, a survival game or an open-world adventure: Vizard Agent looks for the moments that build rather than the moments that pay off, then cuts them to the music's shape.

How is this different from a highlight reel? Highlights show what happened. A trailer withholds, which means different footage entirely.

How much recording do I need? Several sessions. Vizard Agent needs choices, and atmospheric moments are rarer than action ones.

Does it generate the music? Yes, and it generated two here and compared their energy curves before choosing.

Will it grade the footage? Yes. Vizard Agent tests the grade on sample frames before applying it to the whole cut.

Why compare energy curves instead of just listening? Because a track that sounds right in isolation may peak in the wrong place for your footage. The curve shows where the music builds and drops, which is what the cut has to be built against.

Does Vizard Agent pick the shots or do I? Vizard Agent compiles a review sheet of every candidate and chooses against the tone you named. Point at any shot you want kept or dropped and it re-cuts around that.

Can it add jumpscare sound effects? Yes, placed on the cuts rather than laid under them.

Does the interface show in the shots? It does unless you have clean footage. Vizard Agent frames around it where it can.

Does Vizard Agent check the finished trailer? Yes. It reviews a contact sheet and the audio waveform, then runs a final quality analysis.