ff7 movie enhancement?

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StarkRaven

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Sorry if this has been covered, I checked the FAQ and did a quick search and didn't see anything.

Has anyone had success cleaning up the movies in FF7?
I tried opening them in VirtualDub to do some filtering and see if I could do some resizing, but it reports that it needs a VFW (video for windows) tm20 (true motion 2.0)  codec, not just a directshow codec which is what they distribute with the game. Anyone have the TM20 VFW codec, or a different video editing program that can use a dshow filter?

Alternately, has anyone found a way to use a different directshow filter with some better post-processing to play the movies in game? Something like FFDSHOW would be awesome with all of it's filtering options.
 
to open in virtualdub you need this

http://aaronserv.dyndns.org/!!stuff/qhimm/duck.exe

Truemotion toolkit

But you won't much success as the movies appear rubbish due to new grapahics cards and bigger monitors. Also the current codec isn't that good either. It has been suggested that divx 3.11 works but I have no success.
 
All of my friends had trouble running the game with divX 3.11 videos at first. In fact, I had too. But it looks like installing fddshow usually helps to solve those probelms.
About the idea of resizing the videos, I'm sorry to say that I think it won't work. I remember I once tried a video which hadn't the same resolution of the original one and the image was simply croped (the game didn't resize it to fit the screen). But maybe i'm wrong :-P.
 
Thanks borde now I can use divx movies with the ff7 tech demo as my opening.avi
 
Thanks for the info. As you said, I've had no luck with getting resized video to work. (All I tried was doubling the size, to 640x480). Encoding at the original resolution with XVID has worked fine so far though. (I have ffdshow installed, which may help.)

I've been playing around with different virtualdub video filter combinations, trying to find one that gives less blocky results than the original video. No real luck so far. Here are some cool looking shots though from one attempt at using a guasian blur. Looks kinda cell shaded.
snapshot20050608184527.JPG

snapshot20050608184600.JPG
 
Why don't you use FFDShow's processing to fix it up?

Set post processing to 100% or so, IDCT to integer or reference...use the x-sharpen filter...
 
Just figured out how to load up ffdshow filters in virtualdub so thats what i'm doing now. Whats IDCT about? I found a DCT setting in my build of ffdshow but it just gave me a series of boxes with numbers in them and no help on how to adjust them.
 
oops, found the IDCT setting under misc. settings. I have it set to auto. What does changing it do?

What I'm really trying to do is smooth out the video. The jagged edges from the in-game resizing is what is bugging me the most. But I don't think that any amount of filtering the files will fix the crappy in-game stretching.
 
IDCT helps clarity quite a bit. IMO, Integer looks best across the board.

The filtering won't save it from the bad stretching, but it will make it tolerable, for sure. Post Processing should fix any blockyness, IDCT should improve that by a small margin and enhance the motion, and X-Sharpen should clear it up and get rid of any noise.
 
I converted game movies with "STOIK Video Converter 2" to "Indeo video 5.10" format and I tested it in game without any problems also video quality seems improve.

Sorry for my english.
 
Just for info, i've managed to use the PSX version of the FMVs in ff7pc (The visual difference is definatly noticable); however, there's no sound.  So i messed around and extracted the sound from the pc versions and encoded them as wavs into the psx version movies.

Good news is, it worked!  Bad news is that the files were too large in K/Mbytes and the video wound up laging behind the audio ingame (worked fine in winamp though, gofig/obviously).

I've not yet tried recompressing the videos (or compressing them while extracting), though compressing them would screw with video quality, and i'd essentially be back at square one, theoretically.
 
Alright, I have spent an entire afternoon and evening trying to get the videos to look decent. For some reason, mine look REALLY BAD ingame. See for yourself:
ff7BAD.JPG


BAD!!!! I havent the slightest idea what to do. First of all, I wanted to use the PSX videos, but I couldnt find a converter for the .mov files. The STR files were fine, but that only accounted for half of the total.

Next, I tried to re-encode the videos in divx or some better format. Still, no matter what filters I used, they looked like crap. I tried that duck.exe thing, but that didnt help and I couldnt find any new filters or anything from it. Then I tried the FFDirectshow filter thing. I got some cool filters set and they worked in Windows Media Player, but when I went ingame, everything still looked the same.

I really dont know what to do. I got all the other problems fixed (though I would LIKE to be able to use FSAA without garbled text, but i can go without it for now). Can someone help me find something I havent tried?
 
Its a problem with ff7.  It only renders color in 16 bits (And not 32), so you'll only have half of all available colors, which results in yuckyness.  If somoene can find away to enable 32 bit color support for the FMVS (ff7s movie rendering engine ahte 32 bit color, and it chops up the movie), then we'd be in beeswax =)
 
I think I heard that the movies are actually done in 8-bit. Urrrgh. They look better loaded into WMP.
 
Alright, that works. I had tried an OLD version I found and it sucked, but this is good. I can now convert the files to whatever format I want and it looks better than the PC versions vids.

So whats the best codec to use? I want the best quality possible ingame.
 
XviD is generally a very versatile codec, though I'm pretty certain MPEG4 encodes use more of the CPU than Duck True Motion ones. Not sure wether this would affect in-game playback on a modern computer.
 
Alright, Im doing them all uncompressed and they look pretty nice ingame. Still a bit fuzzy, but i doubt theres a way around that. Can someone give me a list of which videos need music added to them? Also, is it a problem if the files are several seconds longer than the PC version files? When I add the audio to the file in virtualdub, it cuts the video after the end of the audio, essentially making them the same length as the PC version vids. Should I just swap the audio on all of them?
 
So whats the best codec to use? I want the best quality possible ingame.
Click to expand...
Best quality? No compression...
Click to expand...

yes, but then they run slow.  trust me, i've tried =(

Alright, Im doing them all uncompressed and they look pretty nice ingame. Still a bit fuzzy, but i doubt theres a way around that. Can someone give me a list of which videos need music added to them? Also, is it a problem if the files are several seconds longer than the PC version files? When I add the audio to the file in virtualdub, it cuts the video after the end of the audio, essentially making them the same length as the PC version vids. Should I just swap the audio on all of them?
Click to expand...

They're not longer: they just run slwer becasue they're not compressed.  And dont bother adidng music: It'll make the files so large that the video and audio won't synch up in-game.  trust me, i've tried killing the psx FMV audio, adding the PC' FMVs audio, and putting it in game: The video lage bahind and just gets slower and slower.

But, just the first and last fmvs need music.  Most of the rest have sound effects alredy inbedded, OR the game plays a midi file on top of the video.
 
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