Technical Checklist
Now let’s quickly talk about a few key technical considerations for a VR trailer. These are important because presentation speaks to competence. Even though you aren’t expected to be a studied filmographer or director, if you don’t meet the basic expectations of a trailer, people won’t be confident that your game meets basic expectations either.
Camera Smoothing
So the first thing is to use a smooth spectator camera for capturing your trailer footage. Even though the world looks normal when you’re in the headset, when played back on a flat screen the motion can look erratic because of how much the player’s head moves while playing. Adding a camera smoothing function to the spectator screen is like having a steadicam filming your trailer instead of doing it handheld:
60 FPS Capture
Second, capture at 60 FPS. Even with camera smoothing, there’s still a lot more motion in VR gameplay footage than what you see in a flat screen game, especially with how players move their hands so much up close to the camera. Increasing the framerate of your capture makes the motion more fluid, so it’s easier for viewers to really understand what’s happening on the first watch:
And of course you not only need to capture at 60 FPS but also make sure your game is running smoothly above 60 FPS. VR players are sensitive to unstable framerates since frame stuttering can be uncomfortable in a headset and kill immersion. So make sure your trailer footage is smooth to reassure players that your game will be smooth too.
Grade for Screens, Not Headsets
Third, if your game has dark scenes, absolutely consider brightening the footage either in post or in a development build of the game itself.
Your game is naturally going to be tuned to have the desired brightness in a headset, but this rarely translates to the average monitor. So make sure your footage looks bright enough to be plenty visible on a flat screen—or even a little phone screen—even if that means temporarily increasing the game’s brightness beyond how you want it to appear in the headset itself:
When I capture footage of VR games for this series, I almost always brighten dark scenes during editing to make them easier for all of you to see.
Resolution & Bitrate
And last but not least, make sure you’re capturing your initial footage and doing your final video output in high quality. You’re inevitably going to upload your trailer to streaming platforms like YouTube, which is going to crush the quality of your footage.
Uploading a very high quality source will help offset the inevitable loss in quality. And as platforms and game storefronts improve their streaming quality, you’ll have a futureproofed yourself by making a high quality master from the outset.
If you start by capturing low quality footage, or render out a low-quality finished video, it’s going to hamper all the hard work you put into making a great VR trailer:
‘High quality’ is of course an ever-changing threshold given how people’s screens and internet connections get better over time. As a general rule of thumb for 2025, I would personally aim for:
- Capture & Output: 100 Mbps
- Resolution: 4K (3,840 x 2,160)
- Frames Per-second: 60
Final Trailer Example
Let’s quickly recap before our final example.
We talked about three key lessons: 1) have a hook, 2) show, don’t tell, and 3) tell a story. And we talked about several important technical considerations. In this final example, let’s watch how all of these come together in one great trailer:
Enjoyed this breakdown? Check out the rest of our Inside XR Design series and our Insights & Artwork series.
And if you’re still reading, how about dropping a comment to let us know which game or app you think we should cover next?
