Display MoreIt was just last week that ODVS released version 3.0 of his enhanced WC4 video pack, and now Prophecy is ready too! The stock video of WCP originally had some harsh interlacing, but deinterlacing the footage just made it kind of blurry. His fantastic upgrade techniques don't just upscale what we had before - they use advanced AI/machine learning techniques to add pixels where none previously existed to boost the game's original (and unreleased in the case of WCP!) DVD quality footage into a solid 1080p rendition. Instructions on how to upgrade your copy of Prophecy to accept the new clips are available here. Download links to the updated files are below these two nifty comparison videos. Both English and German editions are available!
- Wing Commander Prophecy: Version 3.0, English (2.2 gig zip)
- Wing Commander Prophecy: Version 3.0, German (2.1 gig zip)
WCP HD Video Pack V3.0 is readyThe WCP DVD videos are a challenge to work with. The interlaced NTSC format combined with the choice to shoot on digital and the... budget-conscious lighting choices from the original production all conspire to make these videos far more difficult to remaster than the WCIV videos.
However, this time around I did a lot of remastering and cleanup work in AVIsynth prior to even running the AI Upscale routines and managed to clean up most of the major issues and pitfalls that were throwing the AI models off. They'll still never look as good as the WCIV remasters simply because the original production quality/budget wasn't as high - but this is a definite improvement over V2.0.
The jaggies are gone, the weird halo/ghosting images around illuminated characters in low-light environments (read: almost every environment in WCP) are gone, and the annoying dot effects over the credits and star system text overlays are mostly cleaned up.
On top of all that, I also applied all the processes I figured out for the WCIV remaster workflow in the production of this new pack. The best news of all is that the improved compression/optimisation techniques have knocked the file sizes down massively. So there's only a single, ~2GB file to download the entire pack!
The pack also includes the requested missing videos that have been remastered from the CD-ROM source (you'll notice them when you hit them. They're better than the CD-ROM videos that the game defaults to if they're not present, but they're noticeably lacking compared to the rest of the pack).
There's also a refreshed ODVS released version 3.0 of his WC4 comparison video!
