ff7 movie enhancement?

I also got some EA re release about a year ago, for not too much more then I bought the original released by Eidos many light years ago.
I hate to say it, but the guys here who release all these patches and edits and also the guys not supporting piracy is unintentionally inflating the price of the game and could possibly be creating money for Eidos/EA/Square from any retail copies that are still around.

I do agree that the patches and edits made to the game add great value to the game.  If the price is being inflated, then that is just the market at work.  To support piracy is to support something illegal.

Sorry, I am not Condoning Piracy.
I am against Piracy, and personally have stopped wasting valuble time downloading PC games/apps (although I hate sony and I differ about ps2 games/apps).

A quality game like FF7 should always be purchased and pirate copies should never even be given such a large look at, I was personally very disgusted when this ultima/ultimate edition and I do remember seeing on sites like sharereactor were always full of people asking for FF7 or releasing it.

No matter what platform I always believe in buying quality games.

Whoops!  I hope my last post didn't sound too much like I was law enforcement or something.     And I am also not the biggest fan of Sony right now, especially after that whole big brother "anti-piracy" initiative.  That's great, help your paying consumers be more prone to viruses.  Smart marketing!

Sorry, I'll get back on topic.  I already have done the registry hack and my movies run a lot smoother.  Now I wanted to try to enhance the movies.  I've used VirtualDub in the past and I'll try those downloads that people have requested to make it work.  Just wondering if anyone else has tried a different codec lately or filter.  Maybe show some screenshots of your labor.

One more technical question.  The SaiNt has mentioned possibly adding 32bit support to his HI-Res patch if time permits.  If this is added to the game, will it also make the movies 32bit?  If he could change the game resolution, is it also possible to change the movie resolution?  Sorry, I'm not too familiar with this game engine.  I just know that it uses pixel doubling for the movie display, so I wasn't sure if it were possible to disable the doubling and set a new movie resolution size.  I'm guessing this is not probable.  If this was, I'm sure someone would have redone all of the 2D backgrounds in the game by now.

The 32bit in the Hi Res patch has already been replied to by The SaiNT and he said it would mean rewriting every bit of code which he has patched, so it was on his 'things to do in my next life' list - if you see what I mean.

Sony's rootkit issue is something just waiting to happen to the music industry.
It is so hungry for money they do not deserve just to please shareholders and directors, it is up to the consumers to put their money where their mouth is and not buy in the first place.

Piracy existed in the days when you would record to tape a song from the radio, and of course exists today.
The only way to discourage piracy is to counter it with innovative and value added content delivery systems.

I dont go and buy a fake/low grade graphics card that claims to be a Geforce 7800GTX and says "made in china" on it do I?

People go buy genuine when it is quality and value for money they are getting.

I for one would love to see a video wrapper/hack or a beginners guide to replacing the videos in FF7 - PLEASE

I completely agree with your standpoint on Sony.  Like they say, "Show them how you feel with your wallet."  If you don't like what they are doing, boycott sony, epic, bmg, and any other affiliates I'm forgetting.  There are now even more online venues where people do nothing but b*tch about Sony.  If that is anyone's hobby, there not hard to find.

That wrapper idea for the videos sounds great.  Just look at the great improvement ff7music got.  Just imagine, get a couple of skilled modelers together and go to work with 3ds max or maya, and there you go.  I have only scratched the surface with 3ds max, but I'm sure there are people here more than capable of such a project.

The only trouble I see is getting the ff7music and the fmv wrapper patch to work nice together.

I for one would love to see a video wrapper/hack or a beginners guide to replacing the videos in FF7 - PLEASE

Click to expand...

I don't think, this would be that easy:
I am only guessing, but I think that for the internal engine the movies are in fact nothing more than another animated background layer. Since the whole background with all its layers is prepocessed and then just pixeldoubled to 640x480, you would have to rewrite the whole engine just to improve the movies as well.

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As for the tutorial, maybe I'll do it, when I have enough time, which would not be the case in the near future.

I used PSMPlay to extract the movies and XVID as Video-Codec.
I didn't choose PSXMC, because some movies, which are actually longer, than they are played in the game (e.g. the opening movie), tend to pause at the end, when I extracted them with PSXMC.

You only have to take special care of three movies: OPENINGE, ENDING2, ENDING3.

The PSX-versions of ENDING2 & ENDING3 are acutally in a half-letterboxed 640x192 format, which the PC version can't play, so I resized them using some filters in VirtualDub to full-letterboxed 320x224 like the PC-originals.

Furthermore, as some people already mentioned, ENDING2 and OPENINGE don't include music on the PSX, only soundeffects.
You can either choose to use the low quality sound from the PC movies instead or remix the PSX track with the original soundtrack (like I did).
It is a little bit tricky to cut and insert the music at the correct position, but the results are far better than the PC track.

Thanks for the PSMPlay tip!  I was having trouble with PSXMC, so I'll give that a try later on my home pc.  And kudos to you if you make a tutorial for the movie enhancement.  Great idea to remix the PSX with the OST.  I'll take a look at the movies I've already done and see if maybe some new music could be put in its place.

yay i found a site where you can download all the movies from the ps1 game YAY!

Heh, I can't believe this thread is still alive. I've barely visited the site since I started the thread half a year ago. I love this site.

For those people who don't own the psx version, I've had good luck filtering the PC video in VirtualDub to eliminate jagged edges and compression artifacts.

Two filters have been particularly helpful. I don't think either one comes with virtual dub, but a google seach should find them.

*WarpSharpen by Avery Lee.
*FFDShow for Virtual Dub

I'm still playing around to find the right settings but things look nicer.

show us some pics lol

Can you guys confirm that the PSX version is missing some of the movies that are in the PC version ?

Some names...fship2.avi, lastmap,avi, last4_2.avi, last4_3.avi, white2.avi, explode.avi, sqlogo.avi and some more...

Thanks!

wintermute,

I have resized with Virtualdub the ending2.avi and now the file (uncompressed) is 300 Mbs bigger than it was before.

Using the Resize filter, I also added Bilinear filtering since it improves the quality and the file size doesn't change at the end. Do you think there would be problems in the game because of it ?

Thanks

UPDATE: I noticed that two files called monitor.avi and gold6.avi have different sizes in CD1 and CD2/CD2.

Did you guys also notice that ? Do you think it's a postproduction mistake when they had to select which avi files fit into the CDs or...?

IMHO if you're replacing pc avi files with your psx ones converted from str you're wasting your time.
I dumped the psx files to mpeg from my psx discs and compared with the avi's from my pc version, they are identical.
The only reasons the pc version videos look worse is because of stretching (which you can't avoid)
and if you use new ffdshow codecs it will decode them instead of the true motion codec, this results in the colours being overbright and more pixelated than they already are.

to disable the ffdshow decoding open up the ffdshow decoder options (for me this is accessible in the k-lite codec pack folder in the programs folder in the start menu:



Wuz.

You can set FFDShow to do the stretching for you, you know.

what difference does it make?
i find the grainyness quite bearable, especially since i sit back to play.