How to cut a horror trailer from your own gameplay
Upload your play sessions and tell Vizard Agent the tone. Vizard Agent reviews every recording for the moments that carry dread, generates and compares two soundtracks by their energy curves, tests the grade on sample frames, and cuts the trailer to the music's cue points.
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
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A trailer isn't a highlight reel. Highlights show you winning and a trailer withholds, so it's built from the empty corridor before the monster rather than the monster itself. Most of the work is looking closely at atmospheric moments, then building the cut to the music's shape. In the session behind this article it:
- Built contact sheets for each recording, checked the audio levels and whether there was dialogue to work around, and reviewed each key scene in detailed frames.
- Inspected the atmospheric details closely: the handprints, the shrine, the ritual circle, the blood room.
- Searched for horror trailer music, then generated a custom soundtrack instead and analysed its energy progression, cue points and structure.
- Generated a second background track and compared the two energy curves before choosing.
- Compiled a shot review sheet of every candidate, rendered serif title cards, tested the cinematic crop and grade on sample frames, and generated the jumpscare effects.
- Assembled to the music cues, calibrated the loudness and checked the waveform on the final master: 1920x1080, H.264, 30fps and 37.5 seconds, with AAC audio.
When does this not work well?
A trailer cut from gameplay is bound by what the game looks like and by who owns it, and no edit works around either. Check what the publisher permits for promotional cuts. Health bars and prompts read as gameplay rather than cinema, a grade can't hide a low frame rate, and if every clip is action there's nothing to build tension from.
Common questions
How is this different from a highlight reel? Highlights show what happened. A trailer withholds, which means different footage entirely.
Does it generate the music? Yes. Vizard Agent 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.