If you spend as much time possible playing Valve games like Half-Life or Team Fortress 2, you might want to check out Source Filmmaker. If you’ve ever thought it would be great to make videos from your favorite Valve games, or even if you’ve never thought about it before but like the idea, Source Filmmaker is the tool you need.

Using Source Filmmaker, you can create, animate and share films featuring your favorite Valve characters and game levels. If you’re a little stuck for an idea, take a look at Valve’s YouTube channel, which features thousands of user films from Valve games, created using Source Filmmaker. You can find videos in almost any genre or category, from comedy skits to movie trailers and way beyond.

Source Filmmaker is quite intuitive, once you understand how the controls work and know the shortcuts. You can probably figure out how everything works by simply loading up your favorite map and starting Source Filmmaker. However, since there are no built-in tutorials or help files, you might find the learning curve frustratingly high. To make things easier, take the time to watch Valve’s video tutorials, which are quite good and will help you start out knowing what you’re doing from the beginning.

Source Filmmaker is a very powerful video creation and editing tool that lets you do some really cool things with your favorite Valve video games. You can import levels and characters from your favorite Valve games to create any type of video you can imagine, and even things you might not yet have imagined. The controls are quite intuitive once you learn them, but it does have a difficult learning curve to get to that “once you’ve learned the controls” point.

One other note about Source Filmmaker is that you’ll need a good graphics card to take advantage of all its video editing features.