You have actually managed to make your opening.avi (which is super special as a sequence, i think) even better than it was. So now it's pretty much perfect. Also, I'll be using many of your vids even if you never touch them again because, for whatever reason, the settings you used work really well on them. But some of the others are still not perfect. At least not on my system.
One that is super obvious and easy to access is sqlogo. I don't have the psx version anymore (though I bought it over the years like 3 times) so I can't compare to them. But DLPB's settings on that tiny movie make it look like a gaggle of nice soft chickobos, while yours looks like a yellow pixelated mess. So what's going on here? I think I might have a clue.
The developers used a number of different techniques to make the original videos, of which I know almost nothing. What I finally noticed was that different settings look better for the different techniques they used. On northmk.avi: the first part of that sequence, which is a quick transition from a field map to a movie as cloud and jessie run to escape the first reactor explosion, looks particularly bad in game with your version, especially when compared to that of Trojak's movies, which are very soft. HOWEVER, the second half of northmk.avi looks pretty bad on Trojak's version; it is a pan out scene overlooking Midgar, with the recently exploded reactor smoking like Chernobyl. This is exactly the type of modeling that looks so good in your opening.avi, and again, your settings bring out all the detail of the city, which suddenly looks animated and alive with activity when compared with Trojaks, which frankly looks like a party platter or something unrecognizable. Were it feasible, I would edit that movie so that it basically switches from Trojak's softer settings to your kind of gritty, more natural settings halfway through. I hope that makes sense. Take it with a grain of salt but I'm a movie person... Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai, that kinda stuff.
OK, now that the complicated stuff is out of the way... my other real criticism is that they are still too dark. Not everywhere, but when they are, it's sometimes severe. A really good example of this is biglight.avi. You cannot ignore the washout of color on a very very angry Ruby weapon (i think it's ruby anyway) and features on the airship in that movie are just swallowed by the black levels. Trojak's version has it's own cartoonish look as a downside but the brightness and available color detail as a result of it is more pleasing to my eye by a long shot. I think I like DLPBs approach more than Trojak's but the softer movies look better stretched out of res.
So that's the rub, I think. For a set of movies with a more or less standard set of parameters across the board, I think you outdid yourself. If you wanted to look at each one individually and adjust them really obsessively frame by frame, I think you could make them look a lot nicer, but I think I'd want 50grand for the job. Your movies are an order of magnitude higher in detail, in a lot of scenes, than any of the previous versions I've watched. I think that was probably your goal, so you nailed it and I really like the results. Thanks again for posting your project and for all your hard work!
P.S. I want to use your eidoslogo cus the very first part is neat looking, but the second part with the actual eidos runs choppy even in windows media player. like its at half frame rate.
