Cutscenes always lag

[narutobarrage17]

I'll say right off the bat I don't have the best computer. The gameplay itself runs just fine, but the cutscenes are always slow and jittery. Thankfully there aren't that many and they're skippable, but it is unfortunate I can't really watch them.

Anyone else have this issue?

[🉑 rezno[R].technology]

The cutscenes are VP8 (Video) + Vorbis (Audio) in only 900-2200 kb/s total. I'm curious what PC you have that the game runs fine, but not the videos played in the game. Though the videos played directly through a game engine can run a bit slower than for example played in a Video Player. There can be also some kind of codec conflict on your PC which makes the videos play with problems. It happens in some games.
Unravel and Unravel 2 for example didn't even want to start, because I had some video codec conflict in K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. I don't know how this is resolved in Hollow Knight.

[tintingaroo]

I remember reading some posts where they mentioned issues with cutscenes. For them it was linked to v-sync in the nvidia control panel being on. Experiment with the in-game v-sync setting and your GPU's. See if there's any change with them on/off.

[sekai]

I've always thought the cutscenes themselves don't have that many frames in the first place. Even when viewed on say, Youtube, many cutscenes just looks a bit "laggy" to me. Not that much of a problem though since most cutscenes don't last for more than like 10 seconds.

[🉑 rezno[R].technology]

They are all rendered in 30 fps files. But of course the perceived framerate can be even lower due to the nature of hand-drawn animations that consist of only a few frames.

[sekai]

Originally posted by 🉑 reznoR:

They are all rendered in 30 fps files. But of course the perceived framerate can be even lower due to the nature of hand-drawn animations that consist of only a few frames.

Anime for instance, is drawn at 24 frames per second but they look smooth (most of the time anyway). Hollow Knight's cutscene looking a bit jittery is probably just a lack of animation techniques being applied to provide fluidity, or the total frame counts being a bit too low.

That said, Hornet's cutscene in City of Tears is fire though.