Game:

Half-Life 2 (2004)

Duration: 8:15

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817

Detailed cutscene technical breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU1A2Xyz91s

Half-Life 2 has some cutscenes where there are two distinct cameras operating at once, each seeing different parts of the world. The game decides how to combine the two cameras into one using one of ten algorithms called blend modes.

The camera A and B views were created by simply spamming a console command that sets the map's script_intro entity to use blend modes 7 and 8. Modes 7 and 8 show uninterrupted views of cameras B and A respectively. Sometimes the cutscene will quickly change the blend mode on a frame that the command did not run on, which is why the views will occasionally flash with a different appearance for one frame at most. At some points, secondary effects like color correction will look odd because they aren't being seen in the intended context.

Blend modes are what powers effects like inverting colors, and since my method forces the blend modes to specific values, those effects do not appear in the camera A and B views. It would be possible to see some, if not all, of camera A and B in their "post-FX but pre-blend" state by changing the camera locations instead of blend modes, but it would be difficult to fit the two extra views in with the three already-existing views, and I felt like they would add the least amount of value to the video, so I did not include them.

Despite taking 30 minutes to record, this took 6 hours and 20 minutes to render.

0:00 Start
0:23 HL2 Intro
1:33 HL2 Outro
3:26 Episode One Intro
5:14 Heart to Heart cutscene (yes I know it says the wrong thing but I am NOT rerendering)

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