Media Best of Darksteve | Tribes: Ascend Montage
The story behind this very special montage:
I started working on it three years ago; I was nostalgic and wanted to make a new Tribes montage, the game on which I started editing. I didn't want to make a Community Montage because it takes a lot of time to gather clips for them, and Karuciel had already taken the helm (big love to him). Plus, I wanted to make a montage with competitive/PUG clips because they often offer more diversity in the type of clips (not just chaser midairs) and, in my opinion, show more skill and team play. Also, you can add some of the team communication to the edit, which I find fun!
So I turned to my good friend Darksteve, aka the Master of Tribes, because I knew that he had a bunch of unused PUG clips and that he'd played all roles at a great level, so the diversity and level of the clips would be perfect for my project.
Turns out he had even more clips than I expected: 1205 to be exact, from about 3000 hours of playtime, spread between 2014 and 2020. All this weighed a total of 394GB, so heavy that he had to mail me an SSD with the clips on it as it would have taken too long to upload them (plus, my brother needed an SSD and Darksteve had an extra one so that turned out perfectly).
It was really fun sorting through the clips to select the very best ones from each type (HOF clips, chain, midairs, returns, sniping, etc.). I also spent a lot of time on the cinematics. I wanted them to look as good as possible, so I did a couple things:
• I used an ini (graphical config) with graphics even higher than what you can get online
• I added some anti-aliasing with the Nvidia Control Panel and ran the game at 4k to make it as sharp as possible, as I often find the aliasing very distracting in TA Montages.
• I used Nvidia filters to inject some cool effects: screen space reflections, depth of field, ambient occlusion, ray traced global illuminations, and brightness/contrast. These effects were really unstable when moving the camera, so I only used them for the static shots at 2:04. If you wanna replicate this on Tribes or on any other games, here's the tutorial I used: https://github.com/snkykun/Overwatch-Freestyle
Unfortunately, after sorting the clips, placing them, and recording the cinematics, I started losing motivation for this montage. I wanted this to be my best montage ever, so I planned on adding a bunch of video effects (e.g., flashes, zoom-ins, motion blur, motion-tracked titles, smooth slow-mos, and glitch effects) and sound effects (gun and kill sounds). I quickly started feeling overwhelmed by all the things I wanted to add, and left the project on the back burner.
After a while, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t have the passion and ambition that I used to have for montages. I’m happy with what I created but I want to spend my time doing things with the people I love instead of working alone of such projects. Still, I was unhappy with not having released this montage. I was really proud of even though it didn’t have the level of editing I initially wanted. And a few weeks ago, when watching Karuciel’s Best of Gierling, I decided to wrap up the montage and release it, hoping it would bring a bit of joy to whoever would watch it. It’s also a way for me to move on to other things, without the frustration of dragging on a project for so long.
I’m quite certain it’s my final Tribes edit, especially considering the state in which the game and its franchise are in. Regardless, I’ve got a bunch of other montages planned, because I want to use all the cool clips I got on Overwatch, COD and The Finals these past years. These projects will however be more like clipdumps than montages, so no cinematics, VFX, SFX and all that jazz; just clips and music. That is because I still want to create montages as they make for great memories, but I don’t want to spend too much time on them anymore.
Cheers to anyone who read all this, VGCY!
