Why do the cutscenes look so awful?

[Arnie Rimsy BSc.SSc.]

Surely they'd be redone in HD?

[Raider_1001]

Originally posted by Prisoner416:

How the hell do you lose the master tapes of one of the most iconic PC games ever made?

25 years plus multiple reorganization plus bureaucracy...a lot of weird things can happen (cough Doctor Who and Apollo tapes cough)

[3D Master]

Originally posted by CobraA1:

You're talking about re-filming live action sequences and re-creating CGI sequences. It's a lot of work, and many actors probably don't look the same as they used to. The original footage was apparently lost.

Hell, some of them don't even live anymore. And a complete recast I oppose.

[3D Master]

Originally posted by Witcher of Drangleic:

Originally posted by Lt. Aldo Raine:

Next time read the information provided about the product before purchasing?

I have read the information and kept up with the game since it was announced. Do you have anything worth saying, or just useless personal attacks?

Then why are you whining about now, here, and why did you need to ask the question of what happened? If you did keep up, you'd know why, months ago. And if you have to whine, you should have been whining about it back then when the information came out, the developers, not to a bunch of players on Steam.

[Sable Crow]

Originally posted by Prisoner416:

How the hell do you lose the master tapes of one of the most iconic PC games ever made?

A combination of a few things, the tapes themselves look incredibly old, people who have some knowledge of tech would look at them (even probably 10-20 years ago) and think junk. Only people that know about audio/visual filming ect would recognise them for what they are.


Combine that with the fact that people probably just took it for granted that they had them and no one thinking they should probably take a digital backup(Also, a digital backup of videos, especially back when it would have mattered, is a huge amount of space).

[The Fifth Horseman]

Originally posted by Prisoner416:

How the hell do you lose the master tapes of one of the most iconic PC games ever made?

By not caring for them after the original release and by having the rights change hands a few times. Remasters haven't been a thing for long, relatively speaking, and from Westwood's perspective once done they weren't planning on using the records for anything else.

[TROGDOR]

Originally posted by Crafty:

I kinda wish you had the option to view the OG videos in a smaller window or something.

As far as the next remaster, even if they don't have the original footage for TS/RA2, whats in the game is much higher quality than what we have with this. So an AI upscale for TS and RA2 will look very good.

I think a hefty chunky scanline separation might've helped it out some. Emulate a really low quality digital signal, show as much as is in the original VQA, you could maybe get away with a 2x or 4x upscale & it'd look pretty good. The disadvantage is this would be a very distinct visual choice as opposed to a straight upscale & plenty of people might not have liked that.

Anyway, for Tiberium Sun & RA2, the game file cinematics for those are MUCH higher quality, deluxe 640x480 with fancy 32-bit colour depth (though a little interlaced), so if they can't find the masters of those either, the result will still be much, much better.

Here's what can be done with even a puny 240p if the colour depth is there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo-60pmsuJE

[The Fifth Horseman]

I'm pretty sure Diablo 2's cutscenes were higher res than 240p

[Gummiel]

Originally posted by The Fifth Horseman:

I'm pretty sure Diablo 2's cutscenes were higher res than 240p

And they are a VERY different style, dont have near the same amount of color variety that the C&C cutscenes have, and like no faces, or barely any skin at all showing either, making for a LOT easier job for an AI upscaling

[TROGDOR]

Originally posted by The Fifth Horseman:

I'm pretty sure Diablo 2's cutscenes were higher res than 240p

The off-disc in-game cinematics from the year 2000 were 360p, the 1998 E3 trailer that can be found online was definitely 240p though, 15fps, & a much lossier colour compression on top of that, and there's a face in the trailer that barely even looks like a face. But point-being, the TS & RA2 cinematics are already much higher quality than this & this is already generally a significant step up from the C&C TD & RA remastered cinematics.

Originally posted by Enso Gummiel:

And they are a VERY different style, dont have near the same amount of color variety that the C&C cutscenes have, and like no faces, or barely any skin at all showing either, making for a LOT easier job for an AI upscaling

The colour variety of the C&C cutscenes would make it easier if anything, for AI to distinguish one object from another. Faces of secondary characters in the background aren't going to look great, but the rest will.

[Punished Rusty Shackleford]

Originally posted by Prisoner416:

How the hell do you lose the master tapes of one of the most iconic PC games ever made?

Things gets "lost" when EA destroys your dev studio.

[TROGDOR]

As for tidying the cutscenes up, I've been playing around with some CRT filters & I think scanlines + a subtle dot mask cleans up the cutscene images nicely as I remember them presenting kind-of like this back in the windows 95 days. Different vertical resolutions seem to suit different cinematics differently though, I wonder if some of the footage being from the console source MPEGs instead of the VQAs has something to do with it. I personally think it looks better like this, but I understand that people wouldn't want to choose to have some filter between them & the FMVs by default.

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/3231/picture:0

[Deathraven13]

Originally posted by Witcher of Drangleic:

Originally posted by Zef:

this, they are not gonna refilm the damn thing so they can only clean & upscale the original footage.

I'll probably refund it then. What's the point when I already have the old versions on Origin, it looks crap lol

So you want to play this game just to watch the cutscenes ? That's kinda dumb, they did made the in-game graphic better and you can switch from original to remaster easily, I guess you can just watch all the cutscenes on youtube then if that's what you really wanted.

[WraithTDK [TBTPs!]]

THIS: https://youtu.be/ikJLYYTrIxs is the absolute, complete, answer to that question, straight from the developers about their efforts to remaster the videos. Long story short: there just weren't any high-rez master copies to work with, so they had to painstakingly upscale and remaster.

[3D Master]

Originally posted by Enso Gummiel:

Originally posted by The Fifth Horseman:

I'm pretty sure Diablo 2's cutscenes were higher res than 240p

And they are a VERY different style, dont have near the same amount of color variety that the C&C cutscenes have, and like no faces, or barely any skin at all showing either, making for a LOT easier job for an AI upscaling

The irony in that statement is that the faces came out pretty well in the remastered cutscenes, especially closeups. There where the upscale is lacking is small detail, with different objects close together; most notably in outdoor CGI movies. This is partially because there was never any detail there; I don't know how high resolution the original CGI renders were, but given the time even with high resolution the models and end result would have been barren, with very much lacking lots of detail and texture you see in actual footage; ironically, that makes it more difficult for an AI trained to upscale real footage to upscale.

There is something to be said for recreating at least the CGI moves.

In fact; I have to wonder, in the FMV reveal they talk about masters for everything, but don't talk about the original render files. As far as I'm concerned, rerendering the CGI films with the original render files in modern software at higher resolutions constitutes a remaster, not a remake, like so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yemm3fkfars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PDJgJFQmV0

I wonder if they never thought about that, and the render files are stil in their possession somewhere, or if they are completely gone too.