Preamble
Original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain videos were created in 1996 in resolution 320x240. When watched on modern screens with resolution 1920x1080 and higher, they get resampled to fit and with scaling, image get noticeable blur.
Besides low resolution, FMV have some artifacts because of compression techniques used in 96. In PC-version there are huge color degradation and blocking because of 256 color palette used to encode video frames (this artifacts are mostly noticeable in bat-form videos such as malfin, pillfin etc.). PlayStation videos have better quality but have artifacts too, because of JPEG compression some videos having loss of edge clarity and tone "fuzziness".
Modern resampling techniques is able to remove most grude artifacts, keeping blur effect at mininum. They greatly overcome default bilinear filtering at this. Of course, they do not magically turn videos in HD format, but refine them making contrast edsges where they should be, and keep smooth transitions in other fragments.
So, the goal of Distinct Chronicles is not making new videos, but extracting as much quality as possible from original ones.
The two ways
Distinct Chronicles includes:
- Better quality when playing original videos in Blood Omnicide, this is achieved by resampling frames to 1024x768 on-the-fly with bicubic spline filtering provided by libav.
- Refined versions of FMV's with most heavy (and best quality) resampling methods, which can be acquired during installation.
Comparison video
Note: dont forget to switch into HD 1080p quality option to see full difference.
Ohh..
Ahh...
Man, I am so stoked for this, whenever it releases. All my RPG buddies are as well.
There's only so much you can with such old CGI videos like that, what you've done is as good as you can get it most likely...
Short of somehow remaking them all, which isn't possible.