Valve Source Filmmaker now available in open Beta

Valve announced the Source Filmmaker a while back and now its here. Available in an open beta, all you need is a Steam account to give it a go. Its designed to allow consumers to have a crack at creating some short animated films based on the Source engine, in a similar style to those of the “meet the team” Team Fortress 2 videos that have been popping up over the last 5 years from Valve.

Valve designer Bay Raitt noted at the time that the tool was developed to easily create animated movies and facilitate better creative freedom. He said that Valve used it to create more than 50 short films. The Source Filmmaker harnesses the computational power of modern gaming systems to provide a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style of film creation and editing that very few other free programs offer.

Valve has published tutorials to help get uses going in the right direction and there is even an official Wiki on the subject. The Source Filmmaker is available to download at the Steam Store here. According to the system requirements it needs roughly 15GB of storage to effectively use the Filmmaker and it will only work on Windows Vista or 7 based computers, 64 bit is recommended.

Unfortunately the Source Filmmaker is limited to non-commercial use, so don’t expect to make money off Valve’s back, but if you want to have some fun then we’d recommend you give it a download seeing as its totally free!

Source