ff7 movie enhancement?

[Sir Canealot]

You won't get anywhere with VirtualDub's or FFDShow's filters. Nether of them are smart enough to filter the huge amounts of noise in FFVII's movies and leave any detail.
Your only hope is some very smart filtering with AVISynth, and possibly a lot of PhotoShop work. Nether of which are ever going to happen.
For instance, in the intro movie when the camera pans out over Midgar, the whole screen becomes a mass of blocks. There's not really any way to clean that very well on such a low-resolution image.

And even if you planned to tackle this, I'd highly recomend working from the PSX movies — the PC movies were re-encoded from the PSX ones, so the PSX movies are closer to the original source. You also get MUCH higher quality audio — the audio on the PC movies is HORRIBLE.
Edit: though, if I remember rightly, the PSX movies have a slight green hue for some strange reason... :/

Also, if you don't want compression artifacts in your re-encoded movies, try a lossless codec like Huffy or CorePNG. CorePNG might work well.

I might try to tackle this again at somepoint (when I have a bucket of time free). There are newer filters these days that might be used to do a somewhat decent cleanup. But like I'd get through all the movies anyway. And "serious PhotoShop work" still looms, and I suck at PS.

I think I heard that the movies are actually done in 8-bit. Urrrgh. They look better loaded into WMP.

Edit: This is because FFVII seems to skip anything modern like "post processing" or "a decent resizer" (FFVII uses point resizing, I think).

Perhaps FFVII's movies could be bettered just by doing what a media player would do for the movies: some sort of filter for some of the noise, and a bilinear resize for the movies (which would blur them out and remove a lot of the noise anyway).

[Nayus Dante]

Your all wrong! ^_^

Theres several seconds of still frame at the end of the psx videos. After adding the PC audio to all of them, they work fine in game, syncing BETTER than the PC videos. If you dont believe me, rip the intro vid and replace the audio with that of the original PC intro. Watch the guards as the view pans in. They actually sync with the video.

After realizing how big the files were, I decided to compress with the Indeo 5.10 codec. They look great, AND ARE SMALLER THAN THE ORIGINAL VIDEOS! All files for disk 1 ended up over 50MB SMALLER than the PC videos (280mb vs 340mb).

As for quality, there is a DEFINITE INCREASE! The cloudy noise that looked like soap over the entire video is almost gone, with only minimal pixellation when ingame.

My videos went from unbearably bad quality to looking pretty darn good. Heres a list of the steps I did for those that want an easy little guide to get them working.

1. Rip all the videos from the PSX disks  as "Uncompressed" or whatever the All Frames option is

2. In VirtualDub, open each movie from the PC version individually and "Save Wav" for each one

3. Open each video you just ripped from PSX in VirtualDub and click the Audio menu at the top. Select "Wav Audio" and select the appropriate file ripped from the PC videos.

4. Click the Compression option under Video and select Indeo 5.10 (or whatever codec you want, though this is what I used and got low filesizes and great quality ingame).

5. Save the file with the proper filename.

6. Repeat for each video file (took me several hours and im only done with disk 1.

[Cyrus XIII]

Sounds intruiging ... will the game really process any video format that has Windows-wide codecs installed?

[Auron]

Your all wrong! ^_^

Theres several seconds of still frame at the end of the psx videos. After adding the PC audio to all of them, they work fine in game, syncing BETTER than the PC videos. If you dont believe me, rip the intro vid and replace the audio with that of the original PC intro. Watch the guards as the view pans in. They actually sync with the video.

After realizing how big the files were, I decided to compress with the Indeo 5.10 codec. They look great, AND ARE SMALLER THAN THE ORIGINAL VIDEOS! All files for disk 1 ended up over 50MB SMALLER than the PC videos (280mb vs 340mb).

As for quality, there is a DEFINITE INCREASE! The cloudy noise that looked like soap over the entire video is almost gone, with only minimal pixellation when ingame.

My videos went from unbearably bad quality to looking pretty darn good. Heres a list of the steps I did for those that want an easy little guide to get them working.

1. Rip all the videos from the PSX disks  as "Uncompressed" or whatever the All Frames option is

2. In VirtualDub, open each movie from the PC version individually and "Save Wav" for each one

3. Open each video you just ripped from PSX in VirtualDub and click the Audio menu at the top. Select "Wav Audio" and select the appropriate file ripped from the PC videos.

4. Click the Compression option under Video and select Indeo 5.10 (or whatever codec you want, though this is what I used and got low filesizes and great quality ingame).

5. Save the file with the proper filename.

6. Repeat for each video file (took me several hours and im only done with disk 1.

Would you be prepared to upload them in a pack?

I ahve my Movies running from HDD atm.

[EmperorSteele]

I don't think anyone wants to host or Dl a 800 megabyte "pack"

Besides which fact is, it would make the lives of those "Ultima edition" DLing fuckers lives easier, so i vote no =P

And Nayus: I meant that the movies run worse when UNCOMPRESSED.  Compressing them isn't something i had tried yet, and i DO beleive someone aked hopw the UNCOMPRESSED FMVs played.

*shrug*

[ice_cold513]

I don't think anyone wants to host or Dl a 800 megabyte "pack"

Besides which fact is, it would make the lives of those "Ultima edition" DLing fuckers lives easier, so i vote no =P

And Nayus: I meant that the movies run worse when UNCOMPRESSED.  Compressing them isn't something i had tried yet, and i DO beleive someone aked hopw the UNCOMPRESSED FMVs played.

*shrug*

With you on this one the ppl who have dl this game are going to use this. If you host all of them but can i have the intro movies cos im not home for 10 days and i would like to see what you done.

[Sir Canealot]

Why the hell would you use the PC audio?
Use the PSX audio, and add audio delay or something.
The PC audio is like 22khz wave or some crap like that. The PSX audio is well... doesn't sound like crap ^^

[Nayus Dante]

I didnt notice much of a difference in audio, except for the silent parts where the PSX synth was supposed to be playing music. I had to put the PC version audio in to have any music in those parts. I wasnt sure which parts had music though so I just did it to all of them. Theres several seconds of stillness at the end of the PSX videos so this cut them to the proper length to play ingame.

I would be glad to upload the files if someone were to give me the storage. I *could* host the files myself, but I share bandwidth with my parrents and they complain that their wireless connection goes out a lot. If someone could download them from me at night and host them...

So far, Disk 1 is complete and compressed. (I noticed NO loss of quality between Uncompressed and Indeo 5.10) If you all want me to upload everything, I can have it all done sometime tomorrow evening. Let me know if you can host these files and I will talk to you later this evening. I have school and crap so my time to rip is limited.

[Sad Jari]

I would really, really advice against sharing anything copyrighted. Even more so, because it would give movies to people using the "Ultima" edition, like EmperorSteele pointed out.

EDIT: Freaking signature. Again.

---

"Misery is very much like mass; gather enough of it in one place and it starts to attract more. Gather really big load and it will turn into a black hole, not only attracting more, but never letting it go."
~ Me

[savage-xp]

Isnt FFVII 7 Abandoware?

[Sad Jari]

Are you asking seriously?

Or should I start from the "There is no such thing as abandonware"-angle? Because there really is not, handful of old commercial games have been released as freeware, but that's just because people who own the rights wished to do so. To improve the sales of their sequels, most often.

But other than that, games don't mysteriously turn into abandonware, nor do legal people know anything about thing called abandonware as a concept.

---

"Misery is very much like mass; gather enough of it in one place and it starts to attract more. Gather really big load and it will turn into a black hole, not only attracting more, but never letting it go."
~ Me

[Nayus Dante]

I have an idea. If we distribute the movies, password the zip file with an ENTIRE text doccument from the install disk. Or maybe someone could write a program to check for the cd?

[Cyrus XIII]

I think your guide and a few more people's experiences will be enough for anyone interested and perfectly legal.

[EmperorSteele]

Why the hell would you use the PC audio?
Use the PSX audio, and add audio delay or something.
The PC audio is like 22khz wave or some crap like that. The PSX audio is well... doesn't sound like crap ^^

Because when extracting the movies from the pcx version, the sound doesn't come with the video.  It's somewhere else and i can't be arsed to find it.  So i use what's readily avialble: MP3s ^_^

[Nayus Dante]

The sound works, its just the music that the PSX vids leave out because its being played in the background. The PC version has music as part of the videos.

[jamesyfx]

Hmm.? I've played some of the avis in media player and music is nowhere to be heard there.

[dziugo]

Music? No... Sound effects? Yup.

[Nayus Dante]

I think the main ones would be the intro and possibly the ending. Just to be safe, Ive been doing every single vid. Im gonna go through them again though and use the PSX audio for the ones without music, since I listened again and there is a slight increase in audio quality.

[Gallocs]

Is there anyway to get these edited videos to actually be played from the game itself?

[Nayus Dante]

Yep, just alter the registry value for the Movie Path and put the new movies in whatever directory you specified. Make sure theyre the right filenames.

[Sir_Brizz]

Here's the sad part. I own the Pc version but not the PSX version, and I very much would like to have better looking cutscenes

[Gallocs]

Hey Nayus, mind explaining that to me?

[Nayus Dante]

Search this site for the method to accessing the movies from the hard disk. After that, use PSX video rips in place of the original movies.

[Noobie]

I couldn't find a topic about that using the search, so I went to the FAQ and presto it was there. The info you need it placed here: http://www.ff7-universe.com/Downloads/FF7Movietweak.txt

Also note that the FF7 PC movies are not that bad. In-game they play bad because it is 16-bit or 8-bit (with some weird color pallete loaded that doesn't change for the movies). In 32-bit they all look pretty well. The problem is that, altough you can get FF7 to run in 32-bit, the movies will look weird as well as some backgrounds do (Cetra has a 32-bit patch & a FF7 window patch).

[Nayus Dante]

the 32bit patch makes a big black bar in the vids for me. Also, just looking at the vids in winmediaplayer, the PSX ones are a lot better looking. Then again, if you dont want to go through all the work, the PC ones are acceptable...