[FF7PC-98/Steam] FMV Restoration (Discontinued, use Steam FMVs)

[DLPB_]

Thats ok, I will get back to you when I need to do the opening movie and the ending.  You will need:


Virtualdub
Photoshop
Genuine Fractals (latest)
Lagarith codec

Once you have the resulting lagarith encoded video, thats what I will need off you.  The resulting video for the opening alone, will be pretty large.  We can work this out at another time.  It may take 2 hours to encode the opening movie with even your computer.  The ending could take 10-20 hours.


I will give you a bat file which will do all the decoding (of PSX) for you without you having to mess with command line.

 

[willis936]

Wow so do you actually have to open every frame in photoshop, apply genuine fractals, save, rinse, repeat?  That seems like a lot of work in just opening, saving etc.  Is there anyway to make a batch that could knock out this operation for all pngs in a folder?

[Covarr]

Yes, he's using a batch operation. So he said in teh irc.

[DLPB_]

Yes, he's using a batch operation. So he said in teh irc.

Except it still takes ages for it to do the batch but yes that's exactly what I am doing.  Good results have never come cheap,  nothing worth doing is as easy as telling sony vegas to go encode.

Big studios frequently have people working around the clock brushing individual frames.

[pyrozen]

Big studios frequently have people working around the clock brushing individual frames.

!! wow, i never knew this. I'd hate to spend years of schooling just to touch up individual frames of animation for a living! Certainly the folks who do this have much greater talents!

[DLPB_]

Well take star wars for example.   The camera frequently shows up in CP30's metal, someone has to go through all those frames manually getting rid of it. [saw it on official documentary] And of course they are probably paid crap loads for the effort.

Sci fi likes you to believe its as easy as applying a filter.  It isn't.   

[DLPB_]

https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B1JH_wU1qqN4YzU2NzZkNjUtMmUwYy00OGVmLWIyNmItNTQzMmI3NWU4YjAz&hl=en

And sephiroth with jenova

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1JH_wU1qqN4NDZlMDYxNDUtOTVmYy00NGRkLTgyODgtZGNjYWZhNjM4NWI0&hl=en

No more updates now til it is done.

[willis936]

Is this using your second/longer method?

[Timber]

At 800*600 window mode, these fmvs are now better than the prerendered backgrounds.

Perhaps using Genuine Fractals on the matching pre-rendered background would help towards your goal of blending to the field graphic better?

[DLPB_]

Is this using your second/longer method?

Yes, but of course even with that, the result will not be perfect and at times there are serious pixeallation effects due to the original PSX FMV sucking so much.

Perhaps using Genuine Fractals on the matching pre-rendered background would help towards your goal of blending to the field graphic better?

It can't really be done because any matching up at that resolution will make the FMV slightly different to the blocky background (in game).  But so what

[DLPB_]

OK, 1 last FMV, the Opening.  Now with new method and I have hand painted "Midgul" on the car to "Midgar" (not amazing...  but it isnt even seen it goes that fast).

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1JH_wU1qqN4ZTRkNDUwMjMtNWY3ZC00MjNmLTkwMmMtZGIzZTBhNjA4NTI3&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

The opening video fares badly because the original PSX vid encoder did not do a good job with it (lots of action and motion).  But this video is still an improvement over other methods.

New Method in full:

1.  Copy FMV from Playstation disc
2.  Use http://kenai.com/projects/jpsxdec/pages/Home PSX FMV converter tool (at highest settings), to get the FMV into uncompressed video
3.  Place video into virtualdub and extract all frames to PNG
4.  Run batch encoder in Photoshop with Genuine Fractals to enlarge the  frames to 1280*896 and place back to PNG
5.  Place PNG's back into Virtualdub and export to a lossless video with Lagarith
6. Lagarith Video goes into Sony Vegas where a Detail Enhancer by NewBlue Essentials 1 is applied.
7.  Original sound (from PSX Video) is placed with the video.
8.  Video is exported into H.264 with AAC at high settings and average bitrate of 3000KB/s


The opening vid will be out of sync until Aali corrects issue with driver, or we change a few things in the file.

I also suggest you play the game at 800*600 window, as the videos look pretty decent at that res.

[Timber]

I have hand painted "Midgul" on the car to "Midgar" (not amazing...  but it isnt even seen it goes that fast).

Haha that's pretty cool. Makes me wonder what else can benefit from being touched up manually.

Looking at your jenova_e.avi video, for the subtitles, it may be possible to simply paste a higher res font on top of the existing one.
Or possibly a high res FF7 logo on the opening?

[Covarr]

Sir, this looks fantastic. Miles better than the horrible opening on the PC version.

At first, when I tried it in Media Player Classic, it was also playing a midi of "Open Your Heart" from Sonic Adventure. Turns out, I had another file in my downloads folder, opening.mid, and MPC was automatically playing that at the same time because it was in the same folder with the same filename. Like you'd expect it to do with external subtitles, only with a freakin' midi.

edit: A couple of side-by-sides. Link'd because they're pretty big.

[DLPB_]

I have hand painted "Midgul" on the car to "Midgar" (not amazing...  but it isnt even seen it goes that fast).

Haha that's pretty cool. Makes me wonder what else can benefit from being touched up manually.

Looking at your jenova_e.avi video, for the subtitles, it may be possible to simply paste a higher res font on top of the existing one.
Or possibly a high res FF7 logo on the opening?

I tried it.  But would need the exact font and even then it would be a task in vegas, plus there are compression artifacts around the writing.  If you can work out the exact font, I will try again.

[Timber]

I tried it.  But would need the exact font and even then it would be a task in vegas

In Vegas? I was thinking doing it directly on the PNGs before they are put back into vdub.
But yeah the font thing is an issue. Oh well just throwing out ideas.

[DLPB_]

Doing it on the pngs would take my life away

[Boulotaur2024]

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1JH_wU1qqN4ZTRkNDUwMjMtNWY3ZC00MjNmLTkwMmMtZGIzZTBhNjA4NTI3&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

Problem is that you're also enhancing blocking and ringing effects, those would need filtering before doing any resizing. I'm also looking for the best way to deblock without losing too much details (quest of the Holy Graal I guess ). Nice job anyway, I didn't know there were people so devoted to this game.

[DLPB_]

There is little point trying to denoise or deblock it, that just ends up with loss.  Doesn't matter how you do it, they are so poor at the start that it is a worthless task   Short of manually editing each image, forget it.

[Terid__K]

You know, there's no point in upscaling such low quality videos to 4x the original resolution. You'll just put the CPU under unnecessary stress when decoding them.

2x the original resolution would be optimal for these videos. Let the codec do the rest of the resizing.

Just my 2 cents.

[Covarr]

You know, there's no point in upscaling such low quality videos to 4x the original resolution. You'll just put the CPU under unnecessary stress when decoding them.

2x the original resolution would be optimal for these videos. Let the codec do the rest of the resizing.

Just my 2 cents.

I used to think the same, until I saw the results of his current method. No on-the-fly resizing could possibly deliver edges this sharp.

[Terid__K]

You know, there's no point in upscaling such low quality videos to 4x the original resolution. You'll just put the CPU under unnecessary stress when decoding them.

2x the original resolution would be optimal for these videos. Let the codec do the rest of the resizing.

Just my 2 cents.

I used to think the same, until I saw the results of his current method. No on-the-fly resizing could possibly deliver edges this sharp.

Of course not, but 2x the resolution using this method will already make the edges sharp enough without looking too over filtered.

The videos don't have that much detail to begin with, there's no reason to make older CPUs struggle to decode these at full speed. Save that for a higher quality source (like HD videos).

[Hellbringer616]

You know, there's no point in upscaling such low quality videos to 4x the original resolution. You'll just put the CPU under unnecessary stress when decoding them.

2x the original resolution would be optimal for these videos. Let the codec do the rest of the resizing.

Just my 2 cents.

I used to think the same, until I saw the results of his current method. No on-the-fly resizing could possibly deliver edges this sharp.

Of course not, but 2x the resolution using this method will already make the edges sharp enough without looking too over filtered.

The videos don't have that much detail to begin with, there's no reason to make older CPUs struggle to decode these at full speed. Save that for a higher quality source (like HD videos).

I'm not sure older CPU's would use this, Being as they would be to large of a resolution, As is you'll need at least 1280 x 960 to use them.

Any CPU in the past 5 years could do it easy. PC's older then that probably wouldn't be running them in an "HD" Res anyway

[DLPB_]

You know, there's no point in upscaling such low quality videos to 4x the original resolution. You'll just put the CPU under unnecessary stress when decoding them.

2x the original resolution would be optimal for these videos. Let the codec do the rest of the resizing.

Just my 2 cents.

I used to think the same, until I saw the results of his current method. No on-the-fly resizing could possibly deliver edges this sharp.

Of course not, but 2x the resolution using this method will already make the edges sharp enough without looking too over filtered.

The videos don't have that much detail to begin with, there's no reason to make older CPUs struggle to decode these at full speed. Save that for a higher quality source (like HD videos).

It has to be 4X, 2X will not create this level of quality and CPU speeds increase all the time.  It is better to overdo than to underdo and I have chosen 4X.    Too late now.

[obesebear]

Also if your computer can't handle 4x but 2x works fine, there are dozens of video editing tools that can shrink them for free.

[DLPB_]

yup   And since it is shrinking, the loss will be smaller.