Currently highlights are generated automatically, by the system or manually, when you press F9 during a match.
The automatic generation doesn’t always recognize highlight-worthy moments or it starts them too late. For example it seems to focus on the highest DPS-throughput part, but misses the setup and positioning leading up to that moment, which was crucial and what made it possible. It would be nice to be able to capture these moments as well.
There exists a feature already for manually saving a Highlight, but it is only possible to do so during a live match. This is inconvenient, because (especially during a highlight-worthy moment) we tend to focus on gameplay 100%, not on remembering pressing F9 at the correct moment. It is also difficult to time pressing it correctly during a live game and when you missed it, that moment is gone forever.
Technically, you could go back to the replay and capture it with OBS or other software, but the quality would probably suffer, since built-in highlights can be saved in 4k while your PC might not be able to handle that quality in a replay for OBS to capture it. And that video will not have a highlight intro either.
It would be great if you could save a Highlight while in a Replay, so you could fiddle with perfecting your timing. The way I’m imagining this is, you could get into a replay and use the F9 button to “highlight” a section of the seeker bar with it. Then you could press “Play Highlight” and it would play it for you in the Highlight video format. Once you are satisfied, you could exit the Replay view and the Highlight you just made would appear in the History > Highlights section along with the other Highlights you have. There, you could export it just like any other Highlight.
Notes:
I’m not asking for this feature to interfere with POTG’s, just expanding on the already available manual highlight capturing feature (pressing F9), to allow post-game captures as well.
This feature could also be used by the dev team to get data on what players consider highlight-worthy moments and train their automatic highlight capturing on that data. This is just a further possibility though, not the focus of this post.