Direct PC-FX-to-rival-consoles FMV/cutscene comparison thread.

[KiddoCabbusses]

Hey guys. I could've sworn I saw a thread where people were actually having a sort of debate about the PC-FX's FMV video quality in comparison to the other 32-bitters, but it doesn't seem like I can track it down at the time, so I figured I'd make this thread....


Here's the description of the video, in case you need more incentive to click;

FMV Comparison: Langrisser Dramatic Edition (Sega Saturn) Vs. Der Langrisser FX (NEC PC-FX)

Ever have one of those discussions that bring you back to the good ol' days of console wars when Sega and NEC were big players?... Nah, you probably haven't. Tsk!

But in all seriousness, a bit back I was in a forum and there was quite a bit of discussion about the PC-FX's ability to render anime cutscenes and FMVs. Of course, it's commonly said that the PC-FX was the best of all in that regard. But the Devil's Advocate in me had a shocking realization; amidst the talk of technical abilities and which FMV scenes look great, no one I've known has actually taken the effort to -directly compare- a PC-FX game to it's other 32-bit counterparts to provide a good, frame-by-frame, blah-blah-blah technobabble, objective analysis!

Enter myself! Of course, I may not be the most apt for this job, as I'm not necessarily specialized in videophilia yet, but I wanted to get the ball rolling for this!

Since technical details can make a Dramatic (DURHUR PUNRIFFIC) difference in regards to how this turns out, I'll make a note of EVERY DETAIL I think is relevant to this video here.
1) The copy of Langrisser: Dramatic Edition is from an authentic Langrisser Tribute set.
2) The copy of Der Langrisser FX is also authentic.
3) Langrisser: Dramatic Edition is being run on a US Saturn with an Action Replay 4M for a showcase of it's appearance on authentic hardware.
4) Der Langrisser FX is also running on authentic hardware. I have gone for running on hardware over emulation due to the obvious fact that neither Saturn or PC-FX emulation is anywhere near complete-hardware-accuracy yet.
5) Unfortunately I could not include Langrisser I+II for Playstation in this due to not being able to obtain a copy for a reasonable price (Or having a Japanese Playstation). Perhaps someone else can chime in on this?
6) Both setups were hooked to a DVD Recorder with Composite inputs. There are a few reasons for this;
A) Because common A/V is the most likely way anyone who was originally gonna play the games would've hooked it up.
B) Having both on the same video input is the most "fair".
C) With composite video's slight blur, there will be less minor, pixel-specific nitpicking. Any real video issues would probably be constants, and be noticed even on composite - we aren't talking about common-digital-era stuff here, after all.
D) I was too lazy to find a Saturn S-Video cable.
7) Obviously, I've recorded at the best DVD recorder settings I can do.
Putting up on Youtube as vobs.

For refereince, 00:00 up through 2:17 is Langrisser Dramatic Edition, 2:40 onwards is Der Langrisser FX footage. (the time spent beforehand is PC-FX bootup)

Feel free to also download the vob file here;
http://kiddocabbusses.tryhappy.net/rstuf/LDEvDLFX,.vob

[SuperDeadite]

The thing though, is that by using youtube you are forcing both vids to run at the same resolution and frame rate.  And before you even get to youtube, your DVD recorder is converting both vids to 480p (assuming you are using a progressive recorder).  The original videos are not in this format, and are played back differently when run off the respective hardware.  So a youtube comparison is kinda useless imo.

Also interesting to note this one of the few times are the big loser is the PS1.  The PS1 intro is quite a bit choppier then the Saturn's.  Normally it's the other way around, but in the end the FX wins for sure.  The FX also has FMV scenes totally absent from the other two versions.

[KiddoCabbusses]

The thing though, is that by using youtube you are forcing both vids to run at the same resolution and frame rate.  And before you even get to youtube, your DVD recorder is converting both vids to 480p (assuming you are using a progressive recorder).  The original videos are not in this format, and are played back differently when run off the respective hardware.  So a youtube comparison is kinda useless imo.

I understand Youtube has some restrictions, which is why I have the actual vob recordings available on-hand to directly download. That being said, it's still possible to see some of these details even on the Youtube upload;
1) The resolution differences between the videos (DLFX shows slightly more screen, to the extent that sometimes you can actually see slight film damage at the very top and such if you look carefully)
2) The Saturn version's larger macroblocks (What's probably harder to see from the Youtube videos is DLFX's grain, which is likely from a mix of the JPEG compression and the film master.)
3) The Saturn version's strange habit of having holes/particles in the effects that cause bright lights.
4) At around 4:03-4:05 in my video, Der Langrisser FX, when Erwin's standing up, those... strange discoloring "blocks". (This one's weird because it doesn't seem to occur anywhere else and it's not a particularly intense moment in the video that'd warrant a spot where the encoder would choke. I think I'm considering asking if anyone else who has a copy can check to see if that's normal....)

Also, I believe ol' analog composite is 480i, not 480p.
Either way, whatever "different playback" either version would supposedly show there would be the version a normal joe would see if he was running the game on actual hardware, as opposed to using emulation or ripping the videos and playing them back in a codec or such, either of which I felt took too much of the actual hardware factors out for me to consider those fair for testing. (I'm someone who uses bsnes on a regular basis and is able to find real-hardware subtleties it can't duplicate, so I can be pretty nitpicky about that.)

With all that in mind I'd like to argue that this is not useless. Sure, it's maybe not the ideal either (A raw capture card and S-video would probably be better, and I'd like to have PS1 Langrisser I+II to complete the "set" so to speak), but I figured I'd rather work with what I got rather than wait possibly aeons and not be able to open up the discussion, and I feel as though the videos are pretty comparable whether on Youtube or as the vob file.

Anyhow, can anyone point out to me off-hand any other games with PC-FX and Saturn counterparts? Especially ones I don't need to fork over an extensively large sum of money for... D:

[SuperDeadite]

I mean your DVD recorder itself.  Assuming you have one that is capable of recording in progressive scan, all decent ones should.  Meaning what ever I pump in gets processed into a 480p DVD.

[SignOfZeta]

Given how few games there are that exist on multiple 32-bit machines this is kind of an impossible test. What I remember being the case though was that:

Saturn FMV was horrible as Cinipac. Washed out, pale, small. It got way better when the Trumotion method was developed. Better color, still cropped.

Playstation was full screen and basically really good but had a shittty framerate.

The FX destroyed the other two.

[SamIAm]

If you want to compare videos directly, you should get screenshots from emulators.

Through producing subtitled versions of the Zeroigar cutscenes, I learned a thing or two about PCFX FMV.

1 - All FMVs are 256x240 or less, with no exceptions. Most are quite a bit less. The best Saturn/PSX videos are 320x240.
2 - Nearly all of them are 12 FPS. 30 FPS is possible (I've tested TV shows on my actual PCFX) but the quality takes a bit of a hit.
3 - The maximum sound quality is 31khz stereo

A quick word about the Saturn - there is a huge amount of variability in the video quality not only depending on the codec, but other conditions as well, apparently. Maybe there were revisions of the codecs. used Cinepak, and it looks great. used Trumotion and it looks awful (sharp, but cropped with awful framerate). Strangely, is fullscreen, and it's one of the first Saturn games ever released.

The single best quality Saturn FMV in my opinion is from Lunar 2. It's 30FPS and 320x240, with decent mono sound (not sure about the sample-rate), and clean as anything else was back then.

Most PSX FMV is 15 FPS. This includes

Finally, here's a comparison of direct rips. NSFW!
http://pc-fx.moemoe.gr.jp/colume04.html

EDIT: Here's the old topic where this was being discussed.
http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=10536.60

[KiddoCabbusses]

If you want to compare videos directly, you should get screenshots from emulators.

From my past experiences with judging something based on how it plays in emulation, I'd think that'd be a bad idea.
Has anyone here read this article, may I ask? Sure, it's about the SNES, and on a theoretical level this shouldn't matter for linear FMV sequences, but I think as long as there's no PC-FX emulator that aims to be what bsnes is to the Super Nintendo, there will be a high likelihood of an emulated setup not matching up with how things really were.
MagicEngineFX, for some inexplicable reason, couldn't run the pre-patched ISO of English Translated Pia Carrot I got running on real hardware, so that tells me enough to know that I'd rather do a real hardware comparison to avoid any issues with emulation not matching up with how the actual product is.
(Besides, Langrisser games are emulation-issue prone.)

Direct-ripping the videos and running them on a codec-compatible media player would probably be the next best thing, but ripping PC-FX videos directly from ISOs is not something I've seen widely done outside the Zeroigar fan translation project, and it's certainly not something I'd know how to do (If it was easier than analog-recording this video even the slightest bit I'd have gone for that in a heartbeat. And then I'd probably add hardsubs to the videos in Pia Carrot as an addendum to the fan translation).

http://pc-fx.moemoe.gr.jp/colume04.html

Are the stills indicative of how it looks in motion?
Either way, wow, Saturn's got quite the edge in this one. Sharper, less grain, and more screen. It's like the polar opposite of LDE vs. DLFX.
Is there perhaps a Super Real Mahjong PV comparison, as well?

[SamIAm]

The thing is, the PCFX jpeg video decompression in emulators yields an image that is identical on a per-pixel level to what real hardware produces. It's just a single, ordinary image, not a complex mix of sprites, tiles, and scanline tricks. The only difference between the real deal and emulation is how the image is encoded in composite video and displayed on your TV vs. how your monitor winds up displaying the straight RGB. When you're talking about things this minor, the point becomes mostly moot, because so much of the image's appearance winds up depending less on the internal hardware and more on the external display.

For older systems with primitive video encoders, the composite encoding makes an important difference because of the way it often blurs colors together. On the PC-FX, though, especially with its S-Video connection, this difference is far less pronounced. The same is true for the PSX and Saturn.

Emulators also use functionally identical decompression algorithms as what direct-ripping tools use. If I captured a frame from Zeroigar in Mednafen, then captured the same frame using the tools I used to extract Zeroigar's FMVs from the game image, the two images would be identical right down to every last RGB value of every pixel. There's not a lot of room for error here.

This is why I feel that comparisons of screenshots and/or video rips straight from emulators are a valid way to compare the quality of the videos.

That said, with all the variation, I think it's going to be hard to come to much of a conclusion.

By the way, the opening of that Tengai Makyo fighting game is the prettiest and most technically excellent FMV I've seen on the system.