FFXV Video Cutscene Analysis

[Lulech93]

Hey all! Lulech23 here, creator of the Vidsquish cutscene customizer program. With the demo to experiment with, I thought some folks might be interested in my findings about the game's video cutscenes.

Final Fantasy XV stores cutscenes in the "X:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\FINAL FANTASY XV PLAYABLE DEMO\datas\movie" directory. Videos are encoded in Bink 2 format with multi-channel audio for both surround sound and multi-language support. Certain video files have both English and Japanese counterparts, suggesting some videos themselves may be slightly different between the two (e.g. for on-screen text). Bink 2 also supports HDR output on compatible displays.

Even more astonishing, there are 4K and 1080p counterparts for every video, but the 4K cutscenes are just 1080p cutscenes upscaled to 4K, not true 4K. This can be clearly demonstrated by grabbing frames from each version and comparing them as layers in a photo editor. While this is disappointing in principle, it means huge space savings are possible by foregoing 4K cutscenes altogether and just using the 1080p versions. An easy way to achieve this would be to replace 4K cutscenes with 1080p versions, but more advanced methods such as symbolic links would be even more effective. Mod opportunity!

Another mod opportunity comes with the territory of Bink video itself. While not an ideal format, the quality is actually pretty good here, and it's an easy enough format to manipulate. With the power of motion interpolation, it's possible to create native 60 FPS cutscenes to match gameplay, and there's plenty of room for increasing compression and decreasing resolution for even more space savings without dramatically hurting the viewing experience.

All in all, it should be possible to cut the final game's install size in half just by optimizing cutscenes. I applaud Square Enix for the solid encoding quality, but at the same time they lose some points for the unnecessary fake 4K copies. It also would've been nice to see a more open format like .webm (used in many of the remasters of previous games), but then HDR would be lost, so I can't really fault them for using Bink 2 in this case.

[tanman500]

That's really interesting!

[Faint]

well the upscaling was pretty much guaranteed to happen because all these video's are premades, it was wasn't we'd probably be looking at a 300gb download lol

[burnhell]

Amazing, this tool was awesome on NieR Automata, looking foward to use this on FFXV to reduce install size in half and maybe 60fps too. xD

[pauls]

Originally posted by lunarvida:

well the upscaling was pretty much guaranteed to happen because all these video's are premades, it was wasn't we'd probably be looking at a 300gb download lol

The thing is, cut scenes weigh as much as if they were 4k, 50 gb, against original 15 gb but without true 4k quality, only hdr brightness.