Hiya, first I want to thank you for your hard work on this project. I have been watching it and finally got around to testing some of the videos in game last night.
I was really excited because right off the line the intro is the best I've ever seen, the detail achieved is surprising considering the softness. I don't want to be overly negative, but these qualities do not hold out for all of the other movies, though I have not tested very many of them.
I decided to just start from the beginning and test the movies in order. Early on I ran into an issue with brightness or contrast transitions that bothered me. In addition, I felt that something lossy was happening in certain movies, which surprised me considering the quality of the intro. I like the black levels just fine but to my eye the brightness of the transition from the opening movie to the 2d background scene in the train station do not match as closely as could be desired. I don't think it's wildly off by any stretch, but plainly said, I think the movies are a little dark. This issue is more pronounced in the videos that follow, the next being mkup.avi. If you compare that file with that of Trojak's pack, both in game, I think you'll see where the brightness should be.
Another issue which is significant is the breakup of some of the motion into what looks like compression distortion, in the form of square-patterned pixelation. I see this type of picture degradation on cable/satellite feeds, so I assume its related to compression anyway. An early example of both brightness mismatch and square distortion is mk8.avi. Again, compare that file in game with that of Trojak's pack and you will see the brightness is off when the video ends and is replaced by the 2d background, and also that the flames of the explosion are not displaying cleanly in your version. They look overly digitized and square anomalies can be seen there. I suspect a lot of these videos will require individual settings which may differ from one to the next a great deal to get them right.
At any rate, I bet you've nailed quite a few of the other videos' picture quality just as well as the opening, but I've only run through the bombing mission so far; however, I do suspect they are all a little too dark when played in game to exactly match the 2d renders.
I notice a lot of the videos are smaller in size than DLPB/Trojak comparisons. You can crank up the file size, if that's an issue. Took me 10 min to get the whole set.
I know you've spent a lot of time on this already but here's the upshot: if you fix the brightness for some of the movies where transitions make them look too dark, there may be a bunch of others where it doesn't need to be perfect anyway, so a simple adjustment of brightness across the board may solve that issue. As to the loss of quality for the flame motion, no idea what to suggest there but it seemed to me there must have been some compromise made on whatever most affects fast moving objects. The sqlogo.avi is perhaps an even better example. Compared to DLPB's file, the running chocobos are totally distorted in your version. As an aside, your eidoslogo file did not work properly in game for me. It's just as well, I skip that file completely since I want the first thing to come up to be those scampering chocobos.
It's really a massive collection of well done video conversions you have, but I think some more tweaking would be required to make it the definitive example. I do hope you'll continue the work, though, because there were details in your opening.avi that I have not seen before, not on a CRT with a PS1 or anything else either--it brought forward something in the image that was genuinely lost before, in my opinion. Would be a huge shame for this massive project to turn out just a couple good avis that people will like, and a whole pile of them they will prefer other versions of.
