Anyone else getting terrible quality with RE2 cinematics? It looks like there huge pixels everywhere. It’s so distracting. I’m referring to the PS1 version. I’ve got the vanilla version. I tried both composite and component cables and those huge squares are still visible. I tried the game on a PS1, PS2, and PS3. Turning smoothing option to on with the PS3 helps hide them but I prefer playing on a CRT at 240p using PS2 or PS1. This issue occurs with Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 cinematics as well. RE1 and RE3 cinematics don’t have this.
Can anyone check if this terrible image quality is still existent with the dualshock version?
What you are noticing is how the FMV’s are made up. That is out of 8x8 pixel tiles each with its own limited colour bit rate which I would imagine is dictated by how the movies were compressed.
Below is a really clear example of this in R4. I noticed the same thing in Resident Evil 1 + 3 too but it is far less prevalent, perhaps because the first game’s movies are so monochrome and the thirds are just higher quality. But even so there were plenty of places where I could still see those 8x8 squares and how they awkwardly meet sometimes due to the adjacent colour values.
PS1 FMVs are similar to motion-JPEG. Like JPEG, developers could trade off higher compression for lower quality FMV. Macroblocking is always present but depending on how far they had to go it becomes more noticeable.
In terms of hiding it, I find scanlines help. You’re also less likely to notice if you play on a consumer CRT as the hard edges of the macroblocks would get smoothed out a bit.
I use a consumer TV. Too bad though the line count is low. I’m not sure what the number is but I don’t really see any scanlines. Perhaps maybe because it’s just a 21 incher.
Having just played the RE2 Remake demo, I thought you were talking about the weird DOF glitch during scenes, where Leon’s face gets very blurry for no apparent reason, haha.
From what I remember watching John Linneman’s excellent DF Retro video on Resident Evil 2, I think the Dreamcast version has the highest quality cutscenes in terms of encoding and aspect ratio. I’m at work so I can’t check the video at this point.
