MAKE A
TRAILER!

Here is how a launch video usually happens. Someone designs the screens. Someone else exports them to a motion tool. They rebuild the type, guess the colours, animate it, render it, and hand it to an editor who cuts it to music in a third app. Then the headline changes on launch eve and the whole relay race runs again.

We wanted to skip the relay. In PopCraft the scenes are your designs: the same frames, components and brand colours, with a timeline on them. Change the headline and every scene that uses it changes. Swap the brand kit and the trailer recolours itself. When we rebuilt our own trailer natively, that was the point: prove you can go from a design file to a finished, scored, 60 fps film without leaving it.

Each card is a scene on the composition. Scroll through them. Every trick is an ordinary PopCraft feature, and none of it was faked for the video.

1. 010:00

   Meet PopCraft

   A dot pops, a ring swells, 26 pieces of confetti burst with real gravity, and the words rise in a 280 ms stagger.
2. 020:04

   Your whole studio

   Two lines rise and push out. The "desktop." highlight is an ink pill in an auto layout row, so it hugs the word.
3. 030:07

   The Mac

   A dock rises and bounces twice with a decay behaviour, then a window zooms open from 115% below its centre.
4. 040:12

   The modes

   Six circle wipes: Design, Draw, Pixel, Animate, Prototype, Board. Each wipe is an ellipse mask with its scale keyed.
5. 050:22

   One canvas

   Five app names fly in on a diagonal and fold into one. "One canvas." lands on a back-out curve.
6. 060:25

   The template wall

   A real 3D scene: rows of templates scroll on a tilted plane while the camera dives from z −3000 to +1900.
7. 070:31

   GPU effects

   Mesh gradient, plasma, glass, halftone, progressive blur and grid glow. Each one wipes in on a noisy edge.
8. 080:38

   And so much more

   A 12-card bento pops in on a custom stagger order while the camera drifts and zooms through it.
9. 090:43

   Better together

   Avatars join, cursors work at once, comments pin themselves to the canvas. All of it real features.
10. 100:48

    Download

    An iris closes on the wordmark and the call to action. Music fades out over the last 1.8 seconds.

These are short clips of the real editor doing what the trailer does. Each loops while you watch it.

1. 1

   Board it as frames

   One 1920×1080 frame per scene, side by side on a page. Name them, because the names become your markers and your scene list.
2. 2

   Animate each scene

   Key positions, scale, opacity, masks and text. Reach for presets and staggers before you key by hand: they are curves you can still edit.
3. 3

   Sequence them

   Select the frames, click the clapperboard, choose New composition from frames. Every frame is now a scene clip on a strip.
4. 4

   Add transitions

   Click + at any cut. Dissolve, push, wipe, zoom, iris: pick one, set its length and curve in the clip inspector.
5. 5

   Drop in the music

   Add a track with Audio, or generate a bed. Detect onsets, then Cut to the beat and every cut snaps onto a hit.
6. 6

   Export with sound

   MP4 or WebM up to 120 fps, at 720p, 1080p or 4K, rendered frame by frame and streamed straight to disk.

A trailer without music is a slideshow. Compositions have up to eight audio lanes under the scenes. Import a track or generate a bed, then trim it, fade it and key its gain, so the music dips under a voice-over.

The trick editors love: select the music and click Detect onsets. PopCraft listens for the hits and marks each one on the strip. Then Cut to the beat moves every cut onto its nearest hit, and later scenes ripple along. If it is not quite right, undo puts the cuts back.