Making 100% Completion Funny Moment Compilations for The Witcher 3
Most people think recording funny moments during a 100% completion run is as simple as turning on a capture card and letting it run. It is not. You will fill a terabyte of drive space in three days and end up with forty-seven hours of Geralt getting his face stuck in a tree. I spent about sixty hours on my last run doing exactly this — full completion, side quests, Gwent collection, diagrams, all of it. The clips I ended up keeping were maybe twelve minutes total. The rest was just walking through Velen while a raven got stuck to my head for six straight minutes and I could not figure out how to dismount fast enough to fix it. Here is how I actually approached it without losing my mind.
The Setup
I used OBS with a two-hour recording limit per session. Never go longer than that. Your computer will swap to disk caching, your frames will drop, and you will miss the one moment where Dandelion says something accidentally hilarious because the game paused mid-sentence and he repeated the same word three times. I set up three scenes in OBS: one for normal gameplay, one for combat specifically, and one for cutscene captures. The combat scene had a separate audio track so I could filter out the background music later and isolate the random NPC dialogue that happens during fights. That is where most of the unintentional comedy lives. For file naming, I used a timestamp format right from the start. YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SCENE. I tried winging it once and spent four hours renaming clips by memory. Do not do that.
What Actually Goes Viral
The funny moments are rarely the ones you expect. I thought the monster encounter clips would be the highlight. They were not. The actual high-engagement clips came from three categories: Physics glitches involving horses. A horse clipping through a fence and launching Geralt into the air while he is mid-swing at a griffin. These are rare but they show up every single run if you play long enough. I got one in Skellige where the horse just vanished and Geralt kept his upward momentum. He landed in the ocean six feet below. Dumb AI behavior in crowded towns. When a chase sequence triggers in Novigrad, you will get up to twelve NPCs and five guards all pathing through the same narrow street at once. They stack. They slide. They fall over each other like bowling pins. I recorded something in the Port district where three guards got wedged under a market stall and could not move for forty-five seconds while a merchant just kept sweeping around them.
Get the Full Details
Cutscene trigger fails. Sometimes the game loads the next area's ambient audio before the transition finishes. You will hear characters talking about a completely different quest while Geralt is still standing in the previous location. I caught a clip where Nilfgaardian soldiers were having a serious briefing but the audio bled through from a nearby barkeep arguing with his wife about rent.
The Editing Workflow
I use DaVinci Resolve for the actual edit. Free version. It handles multiple audio tracks cleanly which matters when you need to drop the music under dialogue or isolate a sound effect. The first pass is always speed-based. I go through the raw footage and mark every clip that makes me laugh or cringe. That usually gives me about two hundred clips from a sixty-hour run. I trim them to five seconds each right there. Do not leave them longer. Viewers scroll past anything over eight seconds on the first attempt. The second pass is narrative. I look for the marked clips and arrange them so they build. A physics fail followed by a combat fail followed by a cutscene fail creates a pattern. The audience starts laughing before the third one even plays because they know what is coming.
I usually add text overlays for context — things like "Quest: A Fatal Encounter" or "Gwent tournament, round three." This helps people who are not familiar with the game understand what is happening. Without that, a lot of the humor just looks like random violence.
Common Mistakes That Wreck the Video
The biggest issue I see is audio overload. People leave the original soundtrack at full volume under everything. The game's music swells during dramatic moments and it completely drowns out the funny dialogue. I always duck the music to about thirty percent whenever there is spoken words in the clip. Another mistake is including too many combat clips. Everyone has combat clips. The funny stuff in combat only works when something goes wrong — a sign gets cancelled mid-cast, a bomb hits you instead of the enemy, the Aard gesture knocks Geralt himself off a ledge. Those are the clips to keep. The ones where Geralt just wins a fight are not funny, no matter how badly the enemy ragdolls.
File Organization
I keep three folders: Raw, Marked, and Final. Raw is never touched after the initial timestamp naming. Marked contains only the clips I have trimmed and reviewed. Final is the exported render. This way if I realize I missed a better clip two weeks later, I can go back to Raw without having to re-record anything. A 100% run will generate roughly 80 to 120 gigabytes of raw footage depending on how much cutscene time you get into. I compress the final export to H.264 at around 8 megabits per second. That keeps file size manageable without making the video look like garbage on most screens.
Where to Actually Share It
YouTube is the main platform. TikTok works for individual clips but the algorithm punishes content that feels like it was stitched together from other sources, which is basically everything in this genre. So I edit one solid compilation and upload that to YouTube, then pull the three best five-second clips for TikTok with a link back to the full video. I do not use Steam recordings. The capture quality drops significantly compared to OBS and the built-in editor is basically useless for anything beyond trimming the ends off a clip. Save yourself the headache. I also run a second run using the Next-Gen patch now. The physics are different and some of the old glitches are fixed while new ones appeared. The horse collision thing I mentioned earlier does not happen as often. But I found a new one where NPCs will pathfind directly into walls during crowded tavern scenes and just vibrate in place while their dialogue keeps playing normally. That is worth recording for future compilations.
