If you happened to watch all of the Meet the Pyro video, you might have noticed a credit for this thing called the Source Filmmaker. Turns out there is a program that the internal team at Valve uses to make their videos for their games, and they want you to be able to use it too.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zri1c_If6Ic&w=620]
The public software is currently in beta and you can sign up for it at sourcefilmmaker.com so long as you have a Steam account. The program will allow you to manipulate game assets for your films, allowing you to tweak the animations of the characters and add any item in the game to your movie. Using a WYSIWYG style interface, you will be able to directly see how the film will look to your viewers.
As someone who enjoys here and there some fun fan made TF2 videos, it will be nice to see an overall bump up in quality of them so long as people use the software (and why wouldn’t you if your goal was to make TF2 videos?).