its just preference, people enjoy different things. If I want to see the closest thing to a professionally edited product I'd watch torn productions' videos. If I want to see something fast paced and flashy with some cool effects I'd watch stuff by funky visions.

Two of my favourites - "It's Pekka 2" and "too much for zblock" - tell a bit of a story that connects you to the movie. You get a sense of the character of the player and it produces more emotion about the action. This is helped by great music in both of them which really complements the footage. Despite loving beats and loops, listening to the Thé à la Menthe instrumental in full is a bit of a chore on its own for me ... but when it's set to phoon incessantly dominating people, it's great.

I'm late to the thread and about to be controversial too but oh well. For me it's all about the editing. I have seen hundreds of frags of all kind. They just don't impress me anymore, I don't go "woah, nice airshot" after seeing one for the 500th time. And I am sure there are people here who have seen 10 times as many frags as me and I am quite honestly surprised how is it fun watching them anymore for the sake of frags.

You might find the following cheesy, but w/e. I spent some time thinking whether frag videos could be called an art form and if yes, what kind. I came to the conclusion that frag videos definitely have many aspects of art, such as that the enjoyment differs based on the viewer's personal taste, but at the same time not anyone can edit well and a beginner editor's work is going to be unpolished and less enjoyable than that of an experienced editor. As for what kind of an art form it is, I think it can be very closely compared to dancing, where the editor is the choreographer. In other words, a dance performance and a frag video are both someone adjusting the movement of some people (dancers, fraggers) to fit into music.

That's why I enjoy solid flow, interesting colours and innovative effects all assembled to form a theme fitting with the music. Many here might and will find such works "overedited". I think that "overedited" is a meaningless term, as it basically says "you put too much effort into the editing", when what people really mean when saying that is "you made wrong choices in the editing process which made the video unenjoyable for me". And because just by saying something is overedited, you don't specify which choices you didn't like, the term is basically the same as "bad", or "lame" and others - 100% opinion, that you don't even properly explain. Also, the amount of effects used is also irrelevant. The way they are used is important. An editor can use only a single effect but make it so in-your-face that it ruins the whole video, but one can also use 15 effects in a single shot that are so subtle you're not even gonna notice them until the 5th time you watch it.

Of course even I have a limit and at some point I say that it's just too much, and I have no clue what's going on on the screen. But for some reason, my limit seems to be quite different from the rest of tf.tv and the movies that I see praised the most I would call basically fragshows/clip dumps with maxquality config and the occasional smooth. Little to no velocity editing, syncing only to the most dominant drops/beats in the song and colours that are limited to subtle brightness and contrast adjustments seem to be the formula for a 10/10 frag video in the standards of this community (provided that the frags are good and from high division competitive matches). This saddens me deeply as I see either editors afraid to get creative to avoid harsh criticism or creative editors getting underappreciated.

TL:DR; Pls don't make your videos follow the same barely-edited "clean look" formula that every tf2 community-praised frag video follows and actually get creative ffs even if it means "overediting"

#63 Just because that's what you enjoy doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. I'm a little confused as to why you watch frag videos if there literally isn't a single frag that could impress you anymore. Surely there are other forms of video-editing that emphasize effects more. If there aren't well then maybe that says something about the quality of those effects haha. Seems like the majority of the competitive community enjoys clean frag movies and doesn't appreciate the edits made as much. I get that maybe that's not your thing but 'clean' edits shouldn't make you sad and I don't think you should ask people to get 'creative' or defend 'overediting' necessarily. The fact that you take it as an art form doesn't invalidate the fact that some (most people here) make/watch the videos just for the frags.

On-topic: I really enjoy when the shot is highlighted in a creative way, a good example being following the rocket in third-person such as in the first shot of this movie, one of my favorites. Really the distinguishing factor for me is quality of frags, although good presentation can make the frags seem better than they are. I do appreciate it when the frags are laid out intentionally (ie in a logical order: not too many spire clips in a row, huge airshots are all at climax of song, etc.) and the transitions between them are seamless like at 0:32 or so in the aforementioned movie; it's evidence of effort that only serves to help the frag, whereas color correction and blurs and crazy effects will always be contentious.

Perhaps I should have made it clearer. What makes me sad is not the clean edited frag videos themselves, but rather when they are praised by the community for their editing, while videos that focus on the editing get hate and cheeky shitposts. I mean, take the movie that you posted as an example. Is it well edited? Yes it is. However, most of the editing is really basic in all aspects. Is this a problem? No, because it does it's job well and that is highlighting the frags. But is the editing amazing? Far from it. Whereas, this video for example is something that I can call amazingly edited. Does it highlight the frags well? Not as well as the one before I guess, but that's not the point of the video. Videos that highlight the frags have a different purpose than those that highlight the editing and comparing them is kind of stupid.