Messages

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Archive / Final Fantasy VII Original FMV question...

« on: 2004-01-06 20:14:50 »

Well the task of converting PSX version videos and play them uncompressed looks pointless to me, i tried that and i didn't like the result too much work involved to see little difference and beside that having to insert the audio of the pc version, well too much time lost. Now the true question i pose is: Are the pc version movies when played on windows media player look so bad as in game? This can be argued but to me if the in game movies had the aspect of the windows media player movies i would be happy, so with this in mind i tried to look for the problem and it's quite simple the Truemotion codec doens't do space color conversion to 16 bit's and plays in a color mode that i don't remember now but if you put the Truemotion codec in dedug mode you could see that. Now i looked for other codecs to solve this "little" problem i reencoded the movies in several other codecs but the results weren't that good, the only one i did like was to reencode the movies with the "huffyuv" codec that has specific options to do space color conversion to the color mode FFVII PC uses, results where bether than the original so i still use this reencoded movies to play the game.
Other solution was to make the game run at 32 bits this not only improves movie quality but in game image quality problem is that this doens't work for everybody.

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Archive / how to reencode ff7 pc movies into MORGAN MULTIMEDIA JPEG

« on: 2003-06-02 18:23:37 »

Well allow me to disagree i have experienced some problems like with some codecs but not with all of them and most of the times that problem arises because some codecs don't allways encode with the correct frame rate as for the slowdowns i don't know the specs of your machine so it is possible that can happen but on my machine i never had that problem.
As for the Truemotion codec i will have to search for it i know i have it in one of my system backup cd's but be warned the encoder it's an evaluation version putting in other words it's fully functional but it adds some text to the encoded videos, nevertheless you can see that it's not that great even with bether quality encoding the result is not that good in my opinion offcorse, i'll send it to you as soon as i find it.

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Archive / how to reencode ff7 pc movies into MORGAN MULTIMEDIA JPEG

« on: 2003-06-01 14:13:38 »

Well the game doens't force 320x224 resolution but it needs that resolution to enlarge it to 640x480 as for the encoder duck true motion ins't the only one that works (and it's not a great encoder i have it and it's not very good) as i have said before almost any vfw codec will work but some of the codec's will have some problems specially if they can't do color space conversion thats the main problem other problems are encoding frame rate limitation of some codec's that result in a different video time and off corse as the video will be stretched the result will never be that good the one thing that the reencoding process can achieve is to remove that white blockiness that the videos present and make them much more smoother and with more vivid colors, but to me the best solution would be to create a program that could intercept the game calls to the windows api and then overlay a true 640x480 video on top of the game insted of the FFVII standard movies that is a solution that i am working on for some time and that has shown some potencial i will let you guys know if it turns out good.

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Archive / how to reencode ff7 pc movies into MORGAN MULTIMEDIA JPEG

« on: 2003-05-19 20:04:24 »

Well i didn't mean to use all the PSX files just to ones that require less work like adding sound, although the re encoding process in general is a task that requires some work, because many times the re-encoded files don't have the same lenght of the original ones witch leads to some glitches durging gameplay also some modify and try work has to be made specially if you apply some efects to improve image quality like soften or blur, because an efect can be good on a particular FMV but will look ugly in another.
So this ins't a simple task my current FFVII FMV set took me almost three weeks to complete and i think i could have done a lot bether if i wanted to.
And that's exactlly what i intend to do when i have some more free time, but if someone it's really interested in this topic reply here maybe more heads combined can achieve a bether result i personally wouldn't mind at all in participate on something that could help others to have a bether FFVII PC experience.

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Archive / how to reencode ff7 pc movies into MORGAN MULTIMEDIA JPEG

« on: 2003-05-18 20:58:57 »

You could do that using Virtual Dub it's a great and light program to work with video, you can also encode in formats other than avi you can even use divx or mpeg just alter the extension of the file to avi and if the coded is VFW compatible it will playback, i have achieved good result's using the freeware huffyuv codec (mainly because it can convert a 32 bit color space to 24 bit's) giving excelent video quality with almost the same file size of the original version, also if you want the best image quality grab a psx version and convert the video files to raw avi files quality gets a lot bether the only problem is that the psx video files don't carry sound for instance in the PC intro video the sound is in the avi file and in the PSX version it does not, but there is no problem with virtual dub you can cut the sound of the PC version file and add it to the converted PSX version and then reencode it to the codec of your choice. I'm currently using the files that i created with the huffyuv codec and the difference
Let me know your progress and findings as this is a topic that interests me a lot because i never accepted very well the quality of the PC version FMV's.

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Archive / FF7 and FF8 Anti-aliasing Radeon 9700 Pro

« on: 2003-02-27 19:58:19 »

I got the same result as with the previous drivers, in 3D it works pretty well in conjuntion with anisotropic filtering but in the 2D it's a disaster as the images apear to divided in several blocks, tried to tweak the drivers a bit but so far no practical result's but i'll try some more tweaks and see what happens, my old radeon 64 VIVO did work perfectly so it can be a question of some tweaks well applied to solve the problem.

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Archive / Quiet Music

« on: 2002-11-19 08:53:03 »

As i said upgrading to XP will solve the midi volume issues, as for the gameplay that will depend on the hardware combination, i can tell you that i have played FF7 from start to end with abosolutly no problem at all no crashes or anything, maybe it's luck, i had previously Windows ME and i played FF7 also without any problems except the midi volume witch was easily solved by the method i refered previously.

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Archive / Quiet Music

« on: 2002-11-18 19:34:45 »

Try to install the SoundFont Manager that cames in the FF7 instalation CD, it usually solves the problem, and from times to times you may need to reinstall it again (after directx or drivers upgrades). Also note that on the FF7 And Audigy and even with the SFManager installed midi sound tends to be allways in a lower volume than wave but much much more less noticeable, a good way to solve all this is to upgrade to windows xp and to the latest audigy drivers with this combination i don't need to install the SFManager to get the right volume levels.

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Archive / FF8 Funny Graphics

« on: 2001-12-02 19:42:00 »

Well i read somewere FF7/FF8 didn't run on XP specially FF7, as for FF8 the only thing i know for sure by the look of the menus is that 8 Bit Paletized Textures aren't working very well. But it's nice to see that the test passes!!!

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Archive / FF8 PC Menu/Text Box's

« on: 2001-11-25 20:38:00 »

You could do 2 things to improve that,
1º Use FSAA - 2 Samples Usually Works
2º Get a Voodoo2 or Other Card That Supports 8Bit's Palletized Textures

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Archive / FF7 32Bit Patch

« on: 2001-11-06 21:46:00 »

I read in the forums about a patch to play FF7 in 32 Bit color mode, but i can't seem to find it, does anyone know where to get this patch.