Back in April I talked to RibShark about my project of replacing the cutscenes with the console ones that are higher quality. After countless hours of working on this I finally succeeded.
What follows is what I wrote back in june when I finished the work and forgot it on a corner of my computer :
The sources I used are a mix between PS3 and PS2 PAL/NSTC for the videos, and PC, PS3 and XBOX for the audio.
I eliminated the GameCube videos, they were in a proprietary format that has never been decrypted and will never be, and the XBOX videos were crap, I only kept the audio. The PS2 PAL/NTSC audio were a weird WAV format that no program would recognize, that being for encoding or muxing, so I left them.
Unfortunately the game only allows videos with 512x512 resolution max, so it is blurrier than the sources I used, the PS2 NTSC were 640x336 or 640x360 for one video, the PAL were 512x512 so no real loss for those.
I prioritized the videos with no framerate conversion. I don’t know at what frame rate the custcenes were created, I suspect 25 fps, since it’s a French game. The PS3 and PS2 NTSC videos were converted to 30 fps, this resulted in ghosting in motion, like 24 fps movies when converted to 30 fps on old DVDs.
But a few PS3 and PS2 NTSC ones are perfectly displayed at 30 fps, I think some cutscenes were made in both framerates, maybe all of them, but they may have lost the masters. I don’t know, I’m just guessing.
The original videos were letterboxed (black borders on top and bottom), to keep their 16/9 aspect ratio ingame with 4/3 resolution. But since we run the game with the 16/9 “hack”, the videos are stretched in width to the borders of the monitor.
Thit screws up the aspect ratio. I then removed the black bars, BUT our beloved Ubisoft game added, despite all logic, little black bars on top and bottom, even if the videos were in perfect 16/9 resolution.
I had to add black bars on the sides to balance that. The final look is a slightly letterboxed video, but still in 16/9.
It took a lot of time to guess how thick the black bars had to be to display the videos correctly, since the size of the black bars that the game adds on top and bottom varies.
Having to rerender those videos 2 times (one to crop and add the black borders and another to render at 512x512) would mean a lot of quality loss. There is undeniable quality loss, but that’s only because of the resolution loss.
Now, I’m very peaky on this matter, and if there was even the slightest rendering artefact on a shadow, I wouldn’t like it at all.
I tested all the RAD Video Tools settings, I found the right settings to have no compression artefacts whatsoever, only blur, result of the lower resolution.
But there is a catch that might hold back some people.
After a lot of testing, I guessed the maximum data rate the RAD software would allow to render, and that gave a file about 10 times the original size…
I lowered the data rate to a point where the quality loss was reasonably acceptable, but it was already way bigger than the original size, so I figured what the hell, and cranked up the data rate to the max.
I won’t rerender the cutscenes to a more acceptable size, but I can make a tutorial for the ones who really want files close to the original size
I haven’t done the bonus videos with the Hoodlum yet, I may do it someday.
New higher quality widescreen cutscenes (without the bonus ones) : https://mega.nz/#!cVYXnBiY!IQfbGiJ72PyL ... wNYRUVfAFo
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