I just recently found my FF7 again in an old box and while trying to get it working with Win7 I rediscovered this great forum.
I really love DLPB's FMV Restoration project but I thought it could use a bit of temporal filtering (against the noise and artifacts in the original videos). DLPB said he considers his project done so I thought I'd give it a try from scratch.
So I did the following steps:
-decode the video with jPSXdec
-some heavy Avisynth filtering
-x264 encoding
Here are some screenshots to give you an impression but bear in mind that you have to watch them to see how calm they are, free of noise and compression artifacts:
1280Sharp:
1280Smooth:
As you can see there are basically two different versions with two different video resolutions that you can download.
So you have 4 versions (ordered by sharpness):
1280x896 sharp: A sharp hd version with very little noise. But the heavy sharpening distorts the image a bit, so you sometimes get a "plastic" look.
640x448 sharp: A sharp version with little noise. Because of the downscaling the plastic look is much less pronounced. It's a good compromise between artifacts and sharpness. Also good for slow computers or slow internet download.
1280x896 smooth: A smooth hd version with very little noise. For those who don't like the plastic effect but like a calm video.
640x448 smooth: A smooth version with very little noise. For those who don't like the plastic effect and have a slow computer or internet connection for download.
You can mix all versions, e.g. if you don't like a particular video in sharp you can just switch in the smooth one.
So here are the videos in 4 variants for download that wouldn't be here without the help of
UGerstl who uploaded the videos for me:
640sharp 360 mb
http://www.mediafire.com/?p3dkfo1hlwxos1280sharp 1.255 mb
http://www.mediafire.com/?sy51gu7z1trzy640smooth 308 mb
http://www.mediafire.com/?ko1tfxdjqn0yj1280smooth 831 mb
http://www.mediafire.com/?89b1z31y6bujs
640sharp 360 mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?f=FF28IJS91280sharp 1.255 mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?f=EGYUDJKJ640smooth 308 mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?f=F85YYXRA1280smooth 831 mb
http://www.megaupload.com/?f=BHWNV6CP
The links between MediaFire and MegaUpload are interchangeable.
That means, if one link goes down or the download speed is terrible slow
you can use the other host.
If you use the Bootleg installer from PitBrat, you don't have to decompress the files.
If you have trouble to get the custom movies running you can try Covarr's FF7MovieDir (
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=12305.0)
To get the colors right you have to use at least Aali's driver version 0.7.10 and above.
Feel free to leave a comment on the videos, if you find any errors or have other suggestions just post in this thread. I'll see what I can to to make the videos even better and hope you like them the way they are.
Greetings
Rumbah
PS: Don't get fooled by the file sizes of the 640s videos, although they are pretty small the look much better than the original PSX or PC ones.