[Scummvm-devel] BS2 cutscenes

[Andrej Sinicyn]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J.Brown (Ender)" <ender at scummvm.org>
To: "Max Horn" <max at quendi.de>
Cc: <scummvm-devel at lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2003 2:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Scummvm-devel] BS2 cutscenes

> > 2) If so, did somebody already convert the videos to MPEG2?
>
> I've been working on it when I can, unfortunatly MPEG2 is limited to
> certain fixed framerates - none of which easily match the framerate in the
> smackers, causing sound syncro issues.

Well, that isn't a too big problem, since frame-rate can be changed...
Long time ago I converted StarCraft-videos into AVI and it still had a good
quality. I think it would be a good compromise to use either PAL (25fps) or
NTSC (30fps) since they are standard.

> > 4) If yes, how do we plan to distribute them? If no, we should make a
> > doc for users on how they can convert the movies by themselves.
>
> That's a pending issue. My latest tests gave a rough filesize of 30-40MB
> for all the cutscenes in BS2. This could probably be lowered to 25 or so
> with sufficent quality tweaks (as the source material isn't the best, we
> can easily sacrifice video quality with little actual visible degrading).
> Where we host it is another matter... I can probably get it mirrored at
> various places (Planetmirror, et-al), but the cutscenes actually need to
> be done first. Similar work needs to happen to BS1.

I usually work with TMPEGEnc, it gives very high quality even with small
bitrate. It supports also VBR, which would be perhaps another possibility
to reduce the size.

> There is a localisation issue with BS1 cutscenes, as unlike BS2 the
> smack's also contain voiceover. For now I'm just ignoring that.

An interesting possibility would be separate video and audio stream.
so instead of one cutscene.mpg with audio track you would have
additionally cutscene.mp2 (or .mp3) in the same folder, which would
contain the voice.
The voice streams could then be distributed in a separate package.

> > I think we should move this forward aggressively now. From my POV I
> > don't quite see why we couldn't have settled all of this one month ago
> > (lack of drive apparently was what caused this delay, apparently? :-)
>
> Well, on MY side of things yes :) I don't have the space to do it at home,
> so I have to work on it in my free time at work. I was hoping somebody
> would have worked on this months ago, but nobody else has.

How about me doing this? I have some free time now...

Andrej