2007 Gameplay of Halo 3 "The Way the World Ends" on Legendary, with rare detached camera shots.

This is an upgraded video of a xBox 360 recorded gameplay of the Halo 3 mission "The Way the World Ends" set to Legendary difficulty. On October 25th in 2007 my Gaming Buddy and I spent 5 hours working our way through this mission - where we died 26 times! It was a blast!
In 2007 this video was incredibly difficult to make. One reason was because I didn't have decent video editing tools back then. Dual core back then. No GPU. 1 TB was untouchable. But I had purchased a Blackmagic Design video capture card for the PC so that I could capture gameplay. That capture device was only capable of 720P and could only capture off an S-video or composite video feed (and no HDMI on the xBox console back then). So I had to use the composite video output from the xBox 360 console which was 460 resolution with the 4:3 (square) aspect ratio. But the video tech to capture the gameplay was just the beginning of the challenges.
Halo gameplay (back then) was only from the player's perspective, where the camera was always attached to the player's character. So, the video feed going out to the TV was only from the player's perspective. But, if you set up to record the gameplay using the in-game recording feature of the game server, on playback you could detach the camera from your character and go into "spectator" mode. That's how I was able to get clips of this gameplay with the camera detached from the character, which allowed me to get some amazing wide shots throughout the gameplay while detached from the character. However, that "spectator", mode forced me into a low resolution for the clips. But it was still way cool to get those character-detached shots...at any resolution!
I made good use of the "spectator" mode! At numerous locations of the video you can see that I had the camera watch the building collapse, or right in the middle of explosions, or the Warthogs whizzing by. It was especially fun (and challenging) to position the camera just right so that a Warthog mishap occurred right in front of the camera, such as at locations 1:35, 2:25, 4:15 and 5:45. One shot that I was particularly happy with is at location 2:55 where I used the "spectator" mode to orbit the camera around the Warthog as it flew in a massive jump, but with the camera still locked to the character to restrict the distance from the character. Take a look.
At locations 5:57, 6:16 and 6:30 you'll see the camera inside a Warthog, as if sitting in the passenger's seat. That was really hard to pull off (back then). I used the "spectator" mode explained above to get the camera tucked into the Warthog as far as it would go without being popped out by the game engine logic. Then I took a still screenshot. Back in the video editor, I masked out the Warthog windows to make them transparent and then put a moving scenery behind that, then used a "puppet" tool to simulate the driver arm movement and then bobbed the clip to simulate rough driving movement.
We had a great time that October evening in 2007, after which I put perhaps 50 hours into this video. I had it up on UA-cam for a couple years then took it down with a dismally low view count (my theory was that there were millions of Halo videos much better than mine). After 17 years, all of the original clips are lost deep in some long displaced backup archive with only the original AVI available, from which this remake comes. Please enjoy!