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The Future of Games So, where is all this going? Great places. Over the next few years, DVD-ROM will become ubiquitous, as will MPEG-2 playback. These advances will increase the technical quality of video in games beyond our current goal of "broadcast quality." The larger media size of the DVD-ROM will also allow more video storage capacity per disc. A dual-layer, single-sided disc can hold over four hours of extremely high-quality video, with one gigabyte left over for the rest of the game. Not all video will go over to MPEG-2, though. While great for standalone cut scenes, MPEG-2 is difficult to use within games themselves, where video is displayed in only part of the screen or at the same time that other things are going on. Fortunately, a number of next-generation software-based codecs are hitting the market, such as Duck’s TrueMotion 2X and Rad Game Tools’ Bink. Both provide very high-quality content at reasonable data rates and both should be released by the time you read this. Today’s video production tools are much better suited to game production. The whole video world is going digital, which massively improved the quality and costs of game video. Most of the major video manufacturers have announced progressive scan cameras, which will eliminate the interlacing conversion problems (thereby doubling effective resolution) that have limited quality since the beginning of the game industry. In addition, the next wave of high-definition cameras will offer the possibility of film-quality video on the desktop. The price of professional-quality equipment is also dropping very rapidly, to the point where today’s $4,000 camera is better for game video than the $40,000 rigs of ten years ago. As playback quality increases, so will the demands on developers to produce high-quality video. After decades playing the poor cousin to the broadcast world, DVD and next-generation video playback engines will offer us the opportunity to provide the end user with far better that broadcast quality. Game developers have an opportunity to take a leadership position in video quality but in order to do so the must avoid at all costs the following ten disasters when producing video for games. Ten Digital Video Game Disasters 1. Bad bluescreen. Do things look funny around the edges of your actress’s long hair? Is the background either too visible or not visible enough? That’s the product of bad bluescreen. These sorts of effects can be expensively fixed in post with frame-by-frame tweaking, but it’s much better to get right in the first place. See The 7th Guest.
2. Interlaced video. In analog video, the even lines are captured 1/60th of a second apart from the odd lines. So, when objects are moving rapidly, you see a stair-stepping pattern. It’s ugly, increases data rates, and is easy to eliminate. Every digital video program out there can deinterlace, so do it, or we’ll make fun of you at E3. See Dune 2000. 3. Uncropped video. In analog video, there’s almost always crud around the edges of the image that isn’t seen on TV. Computer monitors show every last pixel all the way around. So you need to crop out the crud on the edges. See the Longbow series. 4. Wrong aspect ratio. Pixels are always square, right? Wrong. Many high-end digital video standards use 720X486 pixels per frame, where the pixels are taller than they are wide. So if the video is played like that on a computer, everything looks wide. Scale the video so that the pixels wind up square and circles aren’t ovals. 5. Bad actors. It’s an old saw in video production that many good stage actors don’t work out well in front of a camera, because their performances are aimed at people thirty feet away in the audience, not two feet away in a close-up. See almost every FMV game made.
6. Poor voice acting. In many ways, poor voice acting is much more of a problem than poor video. There are two main reasons for this: audio is everywhere in games, and voice acting looks easy. Voice acting is not easy. If it was, it wouldn’t be obvious which computer games had the engineers do voice-overs. Voice acting requires skill and experience, and it’s a lot more expensive to spend eight hours in a recording studio with a volunteer than two hours with a professional. Ask this question before using someone as a voice actor: "Are you a member of AFTRA?" If they respond yes, then they’re almost certainly a skilled professional. If they give you a speech about how they don’t like unions, at least they know what business they’re in, and might be okay. If they say "What’s AFTRA?" smile and go somewhere else.(AFTRA is the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.) See the Resident Evil series. 7. Wrong frame rate. Video runs at 30 frames a second, and film at 24 frames a second. The final frame rate of digital video should be an integer fraction of the original frame rate in order to preserve smooth motion. For example, video should play back at 30 FPS or 15 FPS, and film at 24 or 12. Note that if you transfer film to video, you still should restore the frame rate to 24 fps. Media Cleaner Pro does a great job with this conversion. See virtually every game with content shot on film, such as Close Combat. 8. Eight-bit audio. Never, ever, ever use 8-bit audio for anything. Ever. Really. With modern audio codecs, 8-bit always produces bigger files and sounds worse than 16-bit. 9. Mismatched foreground and background elements. So, you want to shoot actors on a bluescreen, then incorporate computer graphic elements in the background? The video looks great, and so do the computer graphics, but why don’t the spaceships look like they’re in the same universe as the talent? Lots of reasons, probably. In order to make elements match, they need to have similar frame rate, grain, motion blur, lighting highlights, and so on. A good animator can make a great looking spaceship. It takes a great animator to make it look like part of the set. 10. Video technical requirements out of sync with the rest of the game. While I like codecs as much as the next guy (well, a lot more than the next guy), it’s a mistake to have the processor requirements for your cutscenes be higher than for the rest of the game. Yet, it happens. Sometimes, testers get so used to skipping past the video that they never check cutscenes on low-end computers. Great looking video doesn’t count if users can’t see it. See Civilization II and Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far.
Ben Waggoner is the chief technologist of Journeyman Digital, a company specializing in pushing the quality envelop for interactive media assets. As the World’s Greatest Compressionist and avid game player, he has an unquenchable need to improve the quality of digital video across the gaming industry. Halstead York is the head of digital media production for Journeyman Digital. When not producing and consulting, he spreads his digital media gospel through teaching and lectures. ________________________________________________________ |
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