Ricebug on 16/5/2015 at 00:45
Does it matter if an FM ships with an NTSC or a PAL movie? I've tried both and they work fine. The PAL version is actually a bit crisper and smaller in size.
Also, what's the highest resolution I can get away with without crippling those players who don't have high-end graphics cards?
ZylonBane on 16/5/2015 at 02:28
Errr... what? Since when do NTSC or PAL have anything to do with AVI files? Those are broadcast television standards.
As for resolution, AFAIK the max is 640x480. Anything above that just gets scaled down.
Yandros on 16/5/2015 at 03:40
ZB is right, 640x480 is the biggest you need bother with, at least for the version you include in the mission ZIP. You should also render one at higher res if you plan to upload it to YouTube, for example. As for what you should worry about with regards to compatibility, the codec is the main concern. The original movies use Indeo but it produces lousy results in my experience. XVid or DivX are both better quality-wise and very commonly installed on people's computers. I believe I used XVid for the briefing in Drymian Codex.
PinkDot on 16/5/2015 at 10:23
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Errr... what? Since when do NTSC or PAL have
anything to do with AVI files? Those are broadcast television standards.
They all share a common attribute - frame rate. 30 vs 25.
Ricebug on 16/5/2015 at 11:57
Cool. As i said, the PAL looks a bit crisper, owing to the brain fart concerning broadcast standards. 640x480 it is.
ZylonBane on 16/5/2015 at 15:44
Quote Posted by PinkDot
They all share a common attribute - frame rate. 30 vs 25.
They're also rectilinear and made of pixels, none of which changes the fact that someone should only be concerned with PAL/NTSC if they're converting a video that's explicitly for television use. Otherwise, it's irrelevant.
So I'm guessing that Ricebug only picked up on the PAL/NTSC thing because it's an export preset in Windows Movie Maker or Video Vegas or whatever it is he's using. I'm further guessing that the "PAL" preset looks better to him because PAL has a lower frame rate, which means each frame gets a bigger slice of the bitrate. This quality difference can of course be overcome by upping the bitrate. On the other hand, 25 FPS isn't terrible. LGS's videos all ran at 15 FPS and they looked pretty good.
A more pressing concern is whether Ricebug is converting a video, or making one from scratch inside a video editor. If he's converting a video, there's a good chance both his PAL (25 FPS) and NTSC (29.97 FPS) presets are the wrong thing to go with, since they may be inducing frame rate conversion, which can lead to judder and/or blurry frame interpolation. In these cases there should be a "Match Source" preset available.
Ricebug on 16/5/2015 at 16:21
Sony Movie Studio Platinum (SMSP) is what I'm using. Making the thing from scratch. Also using (
http://www.freemake.com/free_video_converter/) Freemake Video Converter to doink around with various settings just to see how it appears in-game. The higher res .avi's look only marginally better with the obvious size increase.
Software packages such as SMSP seem to cater to the drag-and-drop crowd, not offering a lot in the way of customization. The Freemake VC will digest any movie format and let you change it any way you want.
