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Idea & Info Wanted: Old game cutscenes / FMV game preservations? (any interest?)

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So… is there any effort in preserving old video game cutscenes and / or Full Motion Video?
These titles used old compression codecs that are harder and harder to decode on modern devices.

Is there any interest in converting them to modern standards?
How about some processing like block removal and upscaling ?

Any advice on how to proceed ?

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I know for a fact that a few PC games like Doctor Who: Destiny of The Doctor and Wing Commander IV has made the cutscenes available in DVD quality and quite recently, Night Trap was remastered in high quality. As for anything else, I wish could be of more help.

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The ‘Video Game Movie Edits’ thread may be of interest mate - it’s an older thread but it checks out 😉
 

These older projects may also be of some use (for ideas, info and software etc), hopefully…

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Extracting-cutscenes-and-gameplay-action-from-PC-game/id/6137
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Rebel-Assault-II-and-Jedi-Knight-Dark-Forces-II-cutscenes/id/6721
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/SW-videogames-cutscenes-esp-Rogue-Squadron-series/id/3046/page/1
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Games-Preservation/id/9380
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Bounty-Hunter-Beyond-The-Game-20-3-DVD-by-Galactus-MoveAlong-ThrowgnCpr-NOW-AVAILABLE/id/9103
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Force-Unleashed-Duology-A-Spence-Edit/id/12420
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Dark-Empire-The-Movie/id/9529
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Knights-of-the-Old-Republic-THE-MOVIE-Finally-finished/id/6949
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/24-The-Game-Cut-Scenes-Fan-Edit/id/4981
 

Edit: The ‘An Index Thread for Star Wars Fan Edits and Other Projects…’ also has some threads on Star Wars gaming in the ‘Miscellaneous’ section - which may be of interest too.
 

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Thanks, I see that some work has been done. 😉

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You probably know already but Night Trap recently had its original source negatives found and scanned for re-release. They basically “remade” the game and it looks gorgeous. There’s a clear demand for projects like that but movement on any of them is little to none unfortunately.

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SpookyDollhouse said:

You probably know already but Night Trap recently had its original source negatives found and scanned for re-release. They basically “remade” the game and it looks gorgeous. There’s a clear demand for projects like that but movement on any of them is little to none unfortunately.

Negatives? I was under the impression that Night Trap was shot on video.

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I’d love for the X-Files game to be ripped and edited into an episode/movie.

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Avatar_Emil_Borg said:

SpookyDollhouse said:

You probably know already but Night Trap recently had its original source negatives found and scanned for re-release. They basically “remade” the game and it looks gorgeous. There’s a clear demand for projects like that but movement on any of them is little to none unfortunately.

Negatives? I was under the impression that Night Trap was shot on video.

Night Trap was actually shot on 35mm film, but that’s not what was used for the 25th Anniversary Remaster. The 35mm negatives are lost, so what you see in the game are time-synced tape masters that James Riley (the director of Night Trap) kept. There’s a few tape glitches and some scenes are missing outright, which you can see here

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deleted_10-Mar-2023 said:

Avatar_Emil_Borg said:

SpookyDollhouse said:

You probably know already but Night Trap recently had its original source negatives found and scanned for re-release. They basically “remade” the game and it looks gorgeous. There’s a clear demand for projects like that but movement on any of them is little to none unfortunately.

Negatives? I was under the impression that Night Trap was shot on video.

Night Trap was actually shot on 35mm film, but that’s not what was used for the 25th Anniversary Remaster. The 35mm negatives are lost, so what you see in the game are time-synced tape masters that James Riley (the director of Night Trap) kept. There’s a few tape glitches and some scenes are missing outright, which you can see here

Wow I thought they got the negatives! It still looks really good.

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SpookyDollhouse said:

You probably know already but Night Trap recently had its original source negatives found and scanned for re-release. They basically “remade” the game and it looks gorgeous. There’s a clear demand for projects like that but movement on any of them is little to none unfortunately.

negitives dont exist for night trap, they where lost, they sourced the final timed video master for release
edit: didnt realise the post above me, sorry

Im that guy who likes megazone 23 a little too much

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i have the Macross 20th anniversary DVD (i dont belive it was a commercial product, but a disc sent to rental stores for repeat play) witch has high resolution versions of the PS1/Saturn DO YOU REMEMBER LOVE/ Ai Oboete Imasu Ka cutscemes.

Im that guy who likes megazone 23 a little too much

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Bumping this thread to inform you that a Japanese DVD-rom version of “Star Trek: Borg” has been preserved on the Internet Archive.

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The idea of “preserving” and “gathering” the CutScenes from FMV is not a bad idea,

but the concept of " converting them to modern standards" as stated in the opening,

is quite not needed and above all destructive of the already low quality of the source.

Moreover, the codecs used in the cutscens are almost all known (there are 3 or 4 at max)

and available to be readily played installing a CodecPack.

A forked idea from this that could have more sense is to convert and organize

all the cutscenes (or whatever extra video present)

in a LOSSLESS video codec like Huffyuv (wich is well supported by FFMpeg) + a lossless audio codec like FLAC.

That would have sense, so the (low) quality could be preserved intact and easily playable with a single modern codec.

If such a project would really start, with a public storage DB to put the .avi in (categorized with informations etc…)

i would glady contribute with the conversion of the FMV isos i have.

So good luck!

EDIT:

I’ve done some conversion test with FFMPEG on my Phantasmagoria (ita lang) iso

ffmpeg -i F:\VMD\740.VMD -vcodec huffyuv -acodec flac -compression_level 12 test.avi

The result is neat and clean perfect!

EDIT 2:

Or much more better with x264 in lossless mode (the resulting file size is hugely smaller)

ffmpeg -i F:\VMD\740.VMD -vcodec libx264 -preset placebo -qp 0 -acodec flac -compression_level 12 test.mkv

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I’ve done a complete conversion of Phantasmagoria 2 with the aforementioned settings

ffmpeg -i F:\DUK\1250.DUK -vcodec libx264 -preset placebo -qp 0 -acodec flac -compression_level 12 test.mkv

For me this could be the “Scanning Phase” of very old video with old codecs.

Upon these “untouched” lossless original files, any restoring/process can be tried.

It would be nice if someone could do a linear fan-edit of the plot out of the cutscenes.

Here’s the link for those interested, i plan to do Phantasmagoria 1 and X-Files

https://mega.nz/folder/RYhD3AKL#742HcaFUCg8DySmW3PwhVg

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I’ve now bought the original DVD release of Survival and have now uploaded the bonus material concerning Doctor Who: Destiny of The Doctor onto the Internet Archive.

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Avatar_Emil_Borg said:

Bumping this thread to inform you that a Japanese DVD-rom version of “Star Trek: Borg” has been preserved on the Internet Archive.

That’s great! The quality is quite good and the resolution is 480i60.
The 60 fps video works well with the handheld / first person camera work!