Best And worst Quality FMV (Streaming video) on the Sega CD?

[kool kitty89]

Another update:
I noticed Terminator's video quality seemed oddly poor, so I took a closer look in emulation, and not only is it 16 color (often a fair bit less -maybe fixed palette) with heavy posterization (though it does use error diffuse dithering, it doesn't look very good regardless -and it's so coarse that it ends up looking like bad static on top of posterization)... but that's not the worst part:
It's also only 200x122 but runs at an extremely erratic update rate averaging around 6 FPS. I'm sorry to say it, but I think I've found something significantly worse than the worst cases in Rebel Assault with Terminator... (Jonny Mnemonic doesn't look much better, but it's higher resolution at least)


But even more interesting, I got thinking on Tenka Fubu again (1991 Game Arts release in Japan) and decided to look at some captures in infranview... and it turns out that it uses a similar format to Sewer Shark and Night Trap with tilmap optimized color (often >30 colors) and what seems to be lossless compression (if any -if 16 kHz audio was used, the video could be uncompressed tile frames) and rather similar dithering used as well.

The main difference from the 1992 Digital Pictures stuff is the spacial and temporal resolutions used: Sewer Shark and Night Trap used 168x104 at 15 FPS while Tenka Fubu uses 256x128 at 7.5 FPS (8 frames per update -similar to Road Avenger) which would also mean more VRAM dedicated to double buffering (not that that much matters for cutscenes).

I wonder if there's any relation to the formats SoA used or if it was simply convergent developments.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDrkEPeEj9Q

[mcurkman]

The intro of After Burner III isn't half bad (if that could really be considered FMV)

[Joe Redifer]

Has anyone tried Tenbu Mega CD Special? The FMV in the intro has PURPLE where BLACK should be. I noticed this on another Japanese Wolfteam game as well, I can't remember what it was called. Devastators, maybe?

[kool kitty89]

Has anyone tried Tenbu Mega CD Special? The FMV in the intro has PURPLE where BLACK should be. I noticed this on another Japanese Wolfteam game as well, I can't remember what it was called. Devastators, maybe?

There's an odd purple/magenta tint through most of the intro to Road Rash, but that's in the 3DO version (and Saturn/PSX?) too.

Road Rash Sega CD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLfjG9ohXhY See Also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygd6OBUAOHw (lower quality but square pixel aspect ratio, if you care) And 3DO to the right for comparison http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjgIED7KJLk




I don't see any purple here: http://www.segagagadomain.com/movie-pages-mcd/tenbu.htm but I'll try it in emulation... from that recording it does look like pretty decent video quality though. (of course, after whatever changed recompression made and filtering/interpolation the player applies)

[kool kitty89]

OK, I took a look and Tenbu Mega CD Special doesn't seem to have any purple where black should be in the intro... maybe there's some weird composite video artifacting going on, but I don't see any such issues in emulation.

Also, it runs in 240x160 at roughly 6 FPS (slightly faster -not sure why as 6 would be a direct division of 24 FPS film or NTSC video tape) and also seems to be uncompressed 16 color video, but definitely with color optimized per frame (every single frame seems to use 16 colors too) and error diffusion dithered (probably floyd steinberg) to a rather nice result. (possibly the best 16 color conversions I've seen on the CD, especially for live action -though there's not too much of that actually... also shows what FMV might have looked like on the Atari ST -or better digitized 16 color stills for that matter)

[Joe Redifer]

Here is what I get with Tenbu:


Model 1 Genesis
Model Sega CD
RGB out transcoded into component
ISO converted to run on US system. Maybe this is some sort of evil region protection by Wolfteam?

[tomaitheous]

Here's where Sega missed an great opportunity; they should have made the composite (or RGB, or whatever) output of the Genesis go into the Sega CD base. But only because there would be a 3 stage/mode filter.. that would blur the CRAP out of the current frame. It could be turned on/off on a scanline basis (roughly). Just imagine, video that didn't look grainy at all... BUT(!) like a 5th generation VHS copy. And I'm talking LP generation to generation copies :O That would be serious business

[Silanda]

Here is what I get with Tenbu:


Model 1 Genesis
Model Sega CD
RGB out transcoded into component
ISO converted to run on US system. Maybe this is some sort of evil region protection by Wolfteam?

That's not the only Wolfteam game to do that: Devastator does too. With the Megacart it runs fine.

[Joe Redifer]

Is it a region protection thing, you think? Yeah, Devastator does it, too. I have an Everdrive, but I cannot get any CD BIOS to load on my system other than the one built in to the CD system. Not sure what is wrong with the Everdrive programming to prevent this.

[Silanda]

Is it a region protection thing, you think?

Maybe, but that would have been quite a strange thing to do back in those days. I would be more inclined to believe that it is an unintended side effect of the region conversion process; a bug that never would have been detected back in the day as the scenerio that activates it would never had occured then. It would be interesting to know if they do it when used with an old school Datel CDX, as that was about the only region converter available back in the day.

[kool kitty89]

Here's where Sega missed an great opportunity; they should have made the composite (or RGB, or whatever) output of the Genesis go into the Sega CD base. But only because there would be a 3 stage/mode filter.. that would blur the CRAP out of the current frame. It could be turned on/off on a scanline basis (roughly). Just imagine, video that didn't look grainy at all... BUT(!) like a 5th generation VHS copy. And I'm talking LP generation to generation copies :O That would be serious business

Yeah, except that's just horizontal blur, and I personally don't even like that... unless it was user selectable (and not only in software) as there's a lot that looks crappier with composite blur/artifacting IMO and looks better with the grain. (even some that I'd take grain over the nice 1 pass v/h blur you showed earlier -but a lot that I agree looks better as such)

So what might indeed have been better would have been a togglable (maybe user operated) single pixel (dot/line) V/H blur filter done to RGB before being converted to composite. (maybe digital even... much easier if there was digital RGB inputs, but a 32x like hack might have been practical too... but then we're also back to the possibility of actual digital pixel accumulation and external palettes for the MCD -using the pixel/color bus- as Chilly Willy brought up before -you wouldn't solve the VRAM/DMA bottlenecks of course, but for a fair chunk of things that wouldn't be as much of an issue anyway -and there was a lot of stuff that wasn't primarily limited by VRAM/DMA bandwidth anyway)
What might have been neat was support for digital blending in both V/H for filtering (perhaps 15-bit RGB output -more if practical) as well as true pixel accumulation for 128/160 wide tile modes with 4x8 cells and 8bit packed pixels (perhaps on a per layer basis)... and extended palettes for both 4 and 8-bit modes too. (for the 8-bit modes, rather than using more CRAM, it might have been preferable for the added 4 bits to have direct control over additional RGB bits, maybe even selectable between 1-2-1, 2-1-1, and 1-1-2 ... and if you had per layer control they could have added translucency as well -maybe use the shadow flag to enable alpha blending)

Actually, that sort of thing would probably have been a lot more cost effective/practical than building a whole new bitmap VDC to overlay MD graphics. An extension of the VDPs existign capabilities with an external RAMDAC with some added features. (perhaps sacrifice some of the ASIC's functionality to that end as well)


Hmm, with alpha blending, the whole digital filtering thing is less useful anyway as you have potential to use 2 layers for separate chroma/luma encoding (that would mean more complex video encoding though, more bandwidth constraints to work around -albeit the tilemap video formats cater to that already), of course the SNES would have potential for such encoding as well, and the Saturn (24-bit too), and the 32x (in software) among others (3DO, etc). (PSX had hardware video decoding anyway)
But that's all encoding dependent and simpler encoding might favor single layer video. (then again, even Cinepak added YCbCr encoded chroma subsampled stuff fairly early on -of course if you wanted to cater to the tile format for added color, better VDP bandwidth -effectively decompressing inside the VDP via tile mapping- etc, it would be preferable to cater to 4x8 or 8x8 tiles as the better MCD codecs did -and preferably take full advantage of the tilemap's features -including flipping- ... it seems that 32x FMV tended to use a software based extension of that format also using 8x8 cells but in 256 colors -not sure why not highcolor as you could use indexed 4-bit cells in any case- for that matter, such a format would have been favorable on the Saturn too)
I mentioned it before, but due to the 8x8 cell nature, artifacts sometimes look more like JPEG tiling rather than the cinepak tiling (which Rebel Assault shows horribly), though I don't really think tilemap/character stuff is very comparable to JPEG compression.


I also mentioned interframe compression earlier... and that would all be tilemap based too, precalculated (ie updating the tilemap -and probably palettes- for every frame of video, but selectively limiting tile data updates -and re-using many from the last frame- probably with variable framerate and variable GOP sizes). That all sounds realistic (and not much more resource intensive -other than managing variable framerate and GOPs), but the encoding process would have been the tricky part: not only designing an optimized encoder, but having the resource to encode video as such. (in some ways it's getting closer to MPEG2 than MPEG1) My modern standards this could be practical rather simply with the resource of PCs today (for PCE/Saturn/etc too given the decoding process is far less intensive -and you could cut back on losless compression of data and such for lower resource use), but back then the encoding process would have been a rather significant concern as well. (today the challenge would be writing the encoding/decoding software alone -while they would have had to do that as well as have powerful enough machines to manage it in a reasonable amount of time or scrap the idea)

Is it a region protection thing, you think? Yeah, Devastator does it, too. I have an Everdrive, but I cannot get any CD BIOS to load on my system other than the one built in to the CD system. Not sure what is wrong with the Everdrive programming to prevent this.

Maybe, but that would have been quite a strange thing to do back in those days. I would be more inclined to believe that it is an unintended side effect of the region conversion process; a bug that never would have been detected back in the day as the scenerio that activates it would never had occured then. It would be interesting to know if they do it when used with an old school Datel CDX, as that was about the only region converter available back in the day.

That would be a pretty weird bug... it seems to be the background/boarder ("window") layer color that's indexed wrong (purple rather than black), and given that BG color is one shared with every single frame of video, that would screw things up for sure. (given the common use of black, it makes sense to have that as the shared BG color -ie when a cell palette color is set to transparent, it shows through to black)

I have no idea why that would show purple in place black for the window layer.

It would be interesting to compare a disc burned straight from the JP native image and played on a modded or JP console.






Oh, and I was wrong about Terminator... the framerate is fairly steady and more like 10 FPS... the emulator was being weird before. (definitely seems to be a crappy fixed 16 color palette though)

[Silanda]

It would be interesting to compare a disc burned straight from the JP native image and played on a modded or JP console

All I can say is that the problem does not occur using the Japanese bios through either an emulator or a Megacart, copy or original disc. If it had been intended as a region protection measure they could have simply locked the entire game out. IIRC it's been mentioned before that there are some functional differences between the Japanese and international BIOS'. Does anyone know what those differences are?

[Team Andromeda]

Another update:
I noticed Terminator's video quality seemed oddly poor, so I took a closer look in emulation, and not only is it 16 color (often a fair bit less -maybe fixed palette) with heavy posterization (though it does use error diffuse dithering, it doesn't look very good regardless -and it's so coarse that it ends up looking like bad static on top of posterization)... but that's not the worst part:
It's also only 200x122 but runs at an extremely erratic update rate averaging around 6 FPS. I'm sorry to say it, but I think I've found something significantly worse than the worst cases in Rebel Assault with Terminator... (Jonny Mnemonic doesn't look much better, but it's higher resolution at least)


But even more interesting, I got thinking on Tenka Fubu again (1991 Game Arts release in Japan) and decided to look at some captures in infranview... and it turns out that it uses a similar format to Sewer Shark and Night Trap with tilmap optimized color (often >30 colors) and what seems to be lossless compression (if any -if 16 kHz audio was used, the video could be uncompressed tile frames) and rather similar dithering used as well.

Terminator FMV is just horrid , I haven't a clue what happened there Tenka Fubu FMV isn't too bad, more so as it was the 1st Mega CD game to use FMV.

For me the best use of FMV on the Mega CD was with Batman & Robin, and Dracula Unleashed . Also some EA Sports titles on the Mega CD featured amazing full screen intro's

[TmEE]

Regarding the color stuff, I have seen similiar things when a 50Hz game is ran in 60Hz or the other way... some timings get wrong and things like that happen, and potential crashes and/or GFX corruption awaits.

[kool kitty89]

Terminator FMV is just horrid , I haven't a clue what happened there Tenka Fubu FMV isn't too bad, more so as it was the 1st Mega CD game to use FMV.

Yeah, at first I wasn't so impressed by it, but I've watched it more and more and noticed that one of the things that I thought was bad conversion initially (washed out looking) was due to the dust of the battlefield being shown.

It seems to be extremely similar to what Sewer Shark and Night Trap adopted a year later. (similar color optimization and dithering with very little -or no- video compression -and lossless only- but trading screen size for framerate) In hindsight, compared to some later FMV, it might have been a good compromise to push for 10 FPS for Sewer Shark and Night Trap and boost screen size. (10 FPS doesn't look nearly as bad as you'd think, and it seem that that's the threshold for looking acceptable and too choppy)

I'm not sure what they did for terminator, but it's nasty... it's definitely not optimized 16 color video (like Wolfteam stuff, Tenbu MCD Special, NovaStorm, or Dune) let alone the tile optimized format (and later compression formats used). Virgin did far better with Dune, sort of like what Psygnosis did with Novastorm, but with more dithering.

For me the best use of FMV on the Mega CD was with Batman & Robin, and Dracula Unleashed . Also some EA Sports titles on the Mega CD featured amazing full screen intro's

Yeah, there's quite a few pretty nice full-screen examples (though most are only 10 FPS -which is pretty much the limit before getting too choppy to be tolerable, though it's also nice as you PAL and NTSC 50/60 Hz both divide nicely to 10 FPS). Loadstar, Wirehead, Bugblasters, Starstrike, etc.
Pretty much the same format as some smaller windowed stuff used, but at lower framerate (they probably could have pushed it higher, but the artifacts would have gotten nasty). Road Rash's intro runs at 15 FPS at a lower vertical resolution.

In terms of animated stuff, I think Dragon's Lair and Space Ace did a bit better than Batman and Robin, but the latter is pretty good too. (I like the dithering used for Dragon's Lair)