The epidemic of low quality prerendered cutscenes (Destiny)
by Cody Miller 
, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, September 24, 2015, 14:38 (3444 days ago)
This bugs the shit out of me. Destiny is a great game, that renders sharply in 1080p on the PS4, and then when we get a prerendered cinematic, it's noticeably less sharp with compression blocks and banding. Why aren't we rendering everything in engine?! Why, if we aren't, are we then encoding our video so it looks like crap? I didn't buy an HDTV to look at a muddy mess.
This is a huge problem with downloadable games, and it's obvious why. File size. You look at a game like FFXIII with gorgeous, sharp prerendered cutscenes, which are playing off the bluray disc and then compare it to a game on PC, or a downloadable game where the file size is crunched. The difference is staggering. If I didn't know any better, I'd also say Destiny is playing videos with bink or some other crappy codec instead of a high profile h.264.
All of this could have been solved by going in engine! You don't have to store videos saving file size, and it looks as good as the console can put out. It also maintains a strong visual cohesion to the entire game. It worked wonderfully in the original release, with only the opening cutscene being prerenedered, and it looking a lot better from what I recall.
This is also the reason we hardly ever see our guardian!
Agreed
by Beorn , <End of Failed Timeline>, Thursday, September 24, 2015, 14:49 (3444 days ago) @ Cody Miller
You and I, though, are on the outliers here. Most everyone else doesn’t notice or give a crap. Obvious compression drives me nuts, whether it be video, audio, or image. We definitely have the tech to make these look spectacular, but budgeting those extra bits is probably tricky at the scale Bungie’s dealing with. At least these cutscenes look better than the Halo 4 terminals did… Ugh.
This is also the reason we hardly ever see our guardian!
This is actually my biggest problem with pre-rendering cutscenes. I absolutely love seeing my Guardian, from our first (and only?) conversation with the Speaker to transmatting the Vex Gatelord head in front of the Queen. My Warlock is a badass and I like when she get screen time. :)
me too. glad you mentioned it.
I thought I was one of the few to notice stuff like that.
The epidemic of low quality prerendered cutscenes
by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, September 24, 2015, 16:14 (3444 days ago) @ Cody Miller
Watched the opening cinematic again. It's a bit soft and noisy, but I wasn't noticing much obvious blocking and banding. What would you say are the worst problem spots?
Why aren't we rendering everything in engine?!
1-So that we can have extremely expressive and plausible character animations, extraordinarily high levels of detail, and high-order supersampling.
2-So that cutscenes can play without significant load times and without setting aside memory for "cutscene areas" (which would probably get awkward in Destiny, with its unified approach to handle multi-purpose areas).
#2 would be partially addressed by something I wondered about during year 1, compromise asset quality a bit (and Tower asset quality a lot) to keep the Tower in memory 100% of the time on PS4 and XB1, eliminating Tower load times and allowing brief/instant loading when going from the Tower back to your previous environment. Seemed like it would be a cool feature for eighth-gen's much larger RAM pools. But that has its own issues, especially now that the Tower isn't the only hub (and with the matchmaking who knows how much time it would actually save).
Agreed
by TheeChaos , Thursday, September 24, 2015, 17:37 (3444 days ago) @ Cody Miller
I definitely noticed this with some of the Oryx cutscenes. Which should be some of the most hair raising moments in the game, ruined by some nice choppy blocks. They have the capability, because for a bit it looks beautiful. then le blocks