Upscaling cutscenes

JC Denton

Member
Hi guys,

I was thinking would it be possible to raise the quality of the original videos. I found this - Gigapixel for Video, an AI-based system for upscaling video files. I'm gonna try with a few clips from No Remorse and No Regret and see the results, although the first clip I used for upscaling didn't exactly turn out all that good. I tested with one of the cutscenes from No Regret, when you meet Denning for the first time. You can checkout side-by-side comparison video here.

Although some details are now more clear, the moving areas (especially faces) now look a bit weird and creepy. Maybe it would look better after some additional manual editing, but all in all not the best start.
 
Hey JC,

I think it looks good! I see what you mean by the weird moving areas.

Could grain or noise reduction in the original video before going through upscale work?

Anyway being able to see some details in that sample video is impressive!

Thanks for posting this and do keep us updated!
 
Very cool. I've seen some efforts for other games like Wing Commander 3 and the upcoming Command & Conquer Remastered. Unfortunately, Crusader has pretty bad video quality to work with. No luck over the years on finding the source video, though game director Steve Hemphill told me a while ago that the source was on Betamax tapes and is stored away somewhere. May be time to spark up conversation with him on that again.
 
Hey guys, good to hear from you again. :)

@JASSI16
Yeah, I tried different things with the video before upscaling, but as Keenan said, the videos are so lowres and highly compressed that I doubt much can be done about it. Maybe in some more static parts of the video the details can be enhanced, but pretty much all the sections with rapidly changing pixels are getting even more blurred after upscaling.
 
For me the face was really the only part that has issues. The rest of it is a huge!!! improvement.

Am I right that the original videos were 240x176? Betamax is something like 486x333 I think, so getting those would effectively double the base resolution then.

In any case you did a fantastic job polishing a turd (no offense intended!) ;)
 
Back
Top