The name's Robertas Petkevicius, born and raised in Lithuania, currently settled in North Scotland. My first encounter with Quake was in summer of year 2000. At the age of 12 I first played Quake III Arena in an internet cafe. It didn't leave a huge impression at that time, but a year later I've found a video on our local ftp server named "The Next Level". It was uploaded by none other than CeTuS himself, yes, we lived a house apart and used to hang around even before Quake was out. Now that left a huge impression and the fact that someone can record their gameplay and sync it to music was very new at the time and tempting to try as a sort of self-expression thing. So that obviously led to getting deep into the game, meeting people like mrks and jrb, seeing all their work was rather impressive in the early 00s.

As for editing itself, the breakthrough moment was seeing jrb's "Tricking iT 2" and having to listen to that first ever properly mixed techno/trance/breakbeat soundtrack in a gaming video. The whole soundtrack seemed so perfectly fitting for the content that the only way to top it seemed to be getting into a thorough research and digging deep underground looking for new genres and that next sound design that I haven't heard before. Which explains my music choices and all the commotion my videos get about it.

Yes, absolutely self taught. Being in your teen years and living in the eastern Europe, the only thing you can afford is self-teaching and pirated software.

Creative Cloud (now affordable lol)

I do have a specific workflow right now. There's a perfect video length to keep one’s attention for a period of time, which is 13 minutes 37 seconds. Going under or over is dangerous lol. So, I pick 4 tracks (3-4 min long) on SoundCloud, some new artists tend to give them away for free, those that are not free I just buy them on whatever platform they're available.

I mix the soundtrack, usually first and last tracks must be uniquely memorable and energetic or whatever feel you're going for. Then I capture content in first person, synchronize it to soundtrack, watch it and decide which parts need 3rd person and fill the rest of the video with that. Once that is done I apply colour correction and whatever 2d graphics it needs to have. If there's a specific intro/outro, I leave it for the last bit, after I have the main part done. And that’s a video done.

That's because I get all the camera perspective ideas and cuts into 3rd person during the workflow of main part, so then at the end I feel competent enough to put up something that would help to introduce the video in the most exciting way to me. Also considering outro, you have to be cautious of how much info you put into intro, so you don't repeat the same information in the outro, making outro quick and engaging or sometimes even leave a cliff-hanger if there are plans for continuation of the series.

Since I mentioned jrb being the inspiration for audio/video editing, I'll go a bit off topic and will tell you that the mapping community in Quake is most influential to me, when it comes to picking the content I want to put in videos. Map aesthetics is what creates the atmosphere, yet gaming community tends to stick to their comfort zone and grind less than 1% of maps that mapping community has made. Which is upsetting and unfortunate. And I don't think retexturing same couple of maps for the video does the justice, unless it's done by an experienced level designer.

The projects that I learned from the most editing wise were my first projects, like Trickography 2 (2009) and The Rocketeer (2011). But I only like the projects I am currently working on. Once it's done and I move onto something new that obviously changes. If I watch any of my older videos I just see mistakes and bits I could improve at the moment of watching it. There's no feeling of pride here.

Depends on the content I want to show. If its 100 demos of old stuff that wasn't put in any video, yet I don't want to loose it or forget about it, I'll do a quantity over quality approach with minimal editing. If it's some decent and relatively new content, I'll make it shorter and more memorable with more effort put into editing. Having grown out of the phase of putting all the pirated plugins and templates, I tend to make content look like its a part of the game, rather than some alien thing of its own.

I only see future in professional video editing, where people have specific tools made for specific promotional type videos and they also get paid for it. I'm talking about Call of Duty, Battlefield, Doom and so on video game trailers. Built short, punchy to build up the hype and give all the necessary information.

There's obviously future in gaming related 3D animation, but that costs resources, time and isn't as easily accessible just now for people to play around with. As for the specific game like Quake, there's as much future as there is support from developer/community. As long as someone gives a creative mind access to their tools, there is going to be future.

There are no recent videos that would have something that I haven't seen before, unless it has something to do with involvement of another game engine. The last video that pushed the editing boundaries was KOS's Speedcapture Promo.

I'll just pass the word that mrks once gave me: sometimes less is more. And add to it: you just need to find the balance.

Shoutouts to KittenIgnition, morbus, dqopb and soulbrother for their genuine interest in the game, its structure and all the undiscovered possibilities the idtech3 engine might still have. And I'd like to thank the community (too many people to name) that keeps building maps, in-game effects and mods to help improve the overall look of our videos.