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Games that featured the Sonic CD Opening & Ending

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Kushami, Mar 7, 2017.

  1. Kushami

    Kushami

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    Hey guys! I'm trying to figure things with this out, actually. Which games featured the Sonic CD OP+ED? Ones I know of are below:

    Sonic CD
    -Well, d'uh. This is the shortened version with the limited color palette.

    Sonic CD PC
    -I'm pretty sure this is the first time the full unedited opening appeared. Was the ending unedited too?
    -Believe the res was 320xsomething.

    Sonc Jam
    -I know it's a bonus in this game, and is one of the few versions which has a somewhat higher resolution and doesn't suffer from frameblending. It also has the missing sequence in the ending credits.
    -Pretty sure the video on this is as close to the master tapes as possible. Every other version after this has had the framerate messed with.
    -The ending song was likely meddled with though.
    -Believe the res was 320xsomething.

    Sonic Mega Collection or Collection+ ?
    -I seem to recall on one of these the OP+ED were a bonus? I can't remember which version of Mega Collection had it, though.
    -This is the first time they were presented in full standard def (720x480), I think.
    -Pretty sure, also, that the videos have been sped up which introduces some bad frameblending.
    -Does someone happen to have the raw files for these from the game? I'd like to investigate the encoding/frames on it.

    Sonic GEMS Collection
    -This seems to reuse the above, but fiddled with them even more.
    -Does someone happen to have the raw files for this as well? I'd like to investigate the encoding/frames on it.

    Sonic CD Remake
    -The version on here is likely ripped from one of the above games and fiddled with (doubtful they had access to the original master tapes), and as such has the frameblending problems of the above. It's also cropped and, because of the frameblending the ending looks really jerky and bad. Not their fault- they did the best with what they had and their resources.

    Are there any more than this?
     
  2. JaxTH

    JaxTH

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    Jack shit.
    Both versions of Mega Collection have the Sonic CD footage.
     
  3. SonicGenesis89

    SonicGenesis89

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    I believe that is all of them to my knowledge. The Gem's Collection version is the best and highest quality version you can find of the animation. Mega Collection they sped up the animation for some strange reason and it suffers from frame blending and it's also more saturated. Gem's Collection the speed is normal and the frames for the most part are not blended. Every now and then you'll come across some frame blending but it's nowhere near as bad as Mega Collection's. Mega Collection's is so bad that the animation and art is practically ruined because it's sped up and all the frames are blended losing some of the art and quality. The only problem with the Gem's Collection version though is that it lacks the R2 cutscene and the part where Sonic destroys the badnik in Quartz Quadrant the part where Sonic is standing and looking at the flower bouncing up and down is cut off abruptly for some strange reason cutting straight to the Wacky Workbench scene. The R2 scene in Mega Collection is practically ruined because all of the frames are so severely blended that there is a lot of lost art. The best quality version of the R2 scene you can find is the Sonic Jam version.

    Sonic Jam is sped up as well but the frames are not blended like Mega Collections. Unfortunately the Jam version suffers from compression issues. So, even though the Mega Collection version of R2 looks high quality, the frames are blended and the Jam version is lesser quality but the frames are intact. It would be nice to have a definitive version of the Opening, Ending, and Pencil test cutscenes. The CD Remake crops the cutscenes and makes them small so that version is kind of useless besides I think they used the Mega Collection footage. The Mega Collection version is more saturated but they also restored and cleaned up the footage a little bit. The Gem's Collection version has more artifacts in the film than the Mega Collection version. PC version I don't think is even worth bothering because it's really low quality. The Sega CD / Mega CD version is pixel styled but I think it's nice to also have. The art and colors are really nice. It also has scenes that the regular animation seems to lack. For example in the opening cutscene there's a part where the camera is looking at Little Planet then the chain leading down to the Eggman rock. In the regular animation the scene is reversed and you start from part of the rock (the Eggman rock is cut off so you no longer see it) and you look up the chain and then up at Little Planet. Another part is during the ending cutscene when Sonic rescues Amy and puts her down, when he runs away she stands and looks where he was once standing and blinks a few times. In the regular animation the scene is cut before it shows her blinking. It's kind of strange that these scenes differ so much between the regular animation and the Mega CD / Sega CD versions. I feel like the Mega CD / Sega CD versions are the more finished versions which is really bizarre.
     
  4. Kushami

    Kushami

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    That's interesting!

    Are there direct rips of the Mega Collection and GEMs collection versions somewhere by chance? IE: The original MPEG2 files?
     
  5. big smile

    big smile

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    It's been awhile since I played Mega Collection +, but didn't they remove the Sonic CD clips and replace it with Sonic Heroes?
     
  6. Josh

    Josh

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    ...wasn't there some kind of fan project a billion years ago to put all the various opening and ending videos on DVD? I remember mounting an .iso file and getting to a DVD menu screen for 'em.
     
  7. Kushami

    Kushami

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    This is what I seemed to remember; I could've sworn they're only on one version of MC.
     
  8. Billy

    Billy

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    Just popped in my copy of SMC+ for the original Xbox. Sonic CD opening is nowhere to be found, unless it has to be unlocked or something.
     
  9. RibShark

    RibShark

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    There's no Sonic CD videos on SMC+. I'd say the highest quality available right now are the versions found on the Taxman releases of the game, but by merging different sources of the video into one a better version could be created. The opening on the Taxman versions doesn't appear to have any frameblending, and on Android/iOS it isn't cropped either, and the compression looks better than that of Gems, making that the best source for the opening. The ending videos all seem to have frameblending on the Taxman releases, and they also seem to on Sonic Gems (at least on the PAL PS2 version, checking the SFD files with VLC), so given that the compression of the Gems videos is worse, it would be the best to source the first parts (before the credits) of the ending videos from the iOS/Android version, and then the part that plays after the credits start from either the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions, as those versions are 1280x720, meaning that it's possible crop and resize the animation down to 640x480 without much of a quality loss.
     
  10. big smile

    big smile

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    It seems like Sonic Team knew they would be releasing Gems collection when they were making Mega Collection Plus (The game has half the Game Gear titles, and, just after the announcement of SMC+, Naka talked about releasing Sonic CD on PS2), so I am guessing they removed the Sonic CD videos to save them for Gems (which had the full game).
     
  11. Linkabel

    Linkabel

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    The DVD in the Sonic 25th Anniversary Selection also has the opening. I actually haven't seen it yet to see what version it is but there's also that.

    If no one has it I can check it out after work.
     
  12. Isn't most of the frame blending issue because Japanese animation is often made at 24fps while NTSC video is 29.976fps? There are many different ways to make this conversion, some giving blurrier results than others, but this can often be undone with the proper video editing tools.

    I remember looking really hard for a good version of the Astal opening (which is also really cool, check it out if you haven't already!), and the best I found was in an official VCD containing some Saturn videos. There was some frame blending, but I was able to reconstruct the 24fps video from that using VirtualDub. The result looks pretty crisp and fluid.
     
  13. SonicGenesis89

    SonicGenesis89

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    Oh, wow. I never knew this. This is very interesting. Would you be able to restore the 24fps on the Mega Collection and Gem's Collection Versions as well?
     
  14. Windii

    Windii

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    I have ripped the Sonic CD videos from Gems a week back. Here.

    Unfortunately, the frame blending problem with the ending exists on pretty much all versions that aren't the original Mega CD version I believe. The problem is that the blending here is something that I believe is called Temporal Scanline Blending. What you get is fields that look like this:

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    Gross! This stuff is nigh impossible to recover as far as I'm aware. I haven't found any tools that can deal with field blending like this. The best one can do is try IVTC and hope to god there won't be too many blends and that the motion smoothness isn't totally ruined. It's nasty stuff - especially in pans where you can end up with an IVTC process giving you a scene with horizontal motion with the top half moving in one frame and the bottom half catching it up in the next frame. Evil.
     
  15. Kushami

    Kushami

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    Oh, it's cool that it's on the 25th Anniversary DVD - is there a way to get the .vobs from that? I'd like to take a look at them. It's possible it's less fiddled with on there.

    I'm looking at these GEMs rips... did you recompress these? They seem to have really bad deinterlacing problems where things wobble up and down, which means they were decombed improperly or this was scaled improperly. I didn't think PS2 games used AVC codec?

    I work in video restoration for a living, so I kind of want to get to the bottom of this, but it's hard to without the raw encodes from the games which I'm not exactly sure how to rip. Is there someone willing to rip the raw files for MC? And Gems if these are not them?
     
  16. Windii

    Windii

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    I did encode these from SFD to MP4, simply because some people have stated that they had problems with playing SFD files for whatever reason. All the problems you mentioned on these videos are the source's problem, not because I encoded/ripped these badly. I could also make Mega Collection rips if you're curious. I doubt they're any better aside from the ending being slower though.

    I'm unfortunately not very video restoration literate so I have no idea how to remove the artifacts in these videos in a way that won't hurt the picture/animation too much and blurring it to the point of being all smudgy and blended. The joys of trying to fix 90s anime footage with no original cels or materials at hand lmao.
     
  17. Flygon

    Flygon

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    Going to ask the very dumb question. Made even dumber, because, as an artist, I mostly work in inking and colouring.

    How laboursome is it to re-draw the frames? How many are there?

    Of course, this would require a team of artists, good organization in the community, and making sure nobody screws the artistic consistency up. But it would seem to be a way to help get a HD restoration and work around the blending issue. Or, much more likely, just a restoration of the frames that are unable to be automatically restored.

    But, having spent two whole weeks trying to colourize a single animation loop, I know just how impractical such an idea is. As utterly kickass as it would be.

    It'd be cool as hell to crunch the math, however.
     
  18. Mastered Realm

    Mastered Realm

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    The opening is a 90-second long video, at 24fps we have about... 2.160 frames?

    That can be reduced by using a big background and moving the layers, though.
     
  19. Andrew75

    Andrew75

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    I say go for it ! But only as long as you have fun with it and don't rush yourself, I know doing something like this would take a lot of time, energy and dedication, ( mostly dedication) and As you progress, I'm sure you'd get faster.
    I've Been working on 1 project for 11 years now, and I'm still going. It's good to pace yourself. And I'm sure even without a team of artists youd be able to pull it off.
    not every frame has sonic in it.
     
  20. SonicGenesis89

    SonicGenesis89

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    To redraw every single frame of animation would be a lot of hard work and would take a lot of time and dedication. It's definitely possible but it will be very time consuming. You'll be practically reanimating the entire opening and ending cutscenes. If you or a team of dedicated artists decided to restore the opening and ending animation it would be really cool to also restore some of the lost scenes in it as well.

    In the Mega CD / Sega CD version of the opening there's a scene that shows Little Planet and then the camera pans down to the chain and then onto the Eggman rock. In the regular animated opening this scene is played in reverse and doesn't show the Eggman rock.

    Another difference is in the ending cutscene for the Sega CD / Mega CD version there's additional animation with Amy Rose. After Sonic puts her down, he runs away and there is a few extra frames of animation for the dust from Sonic as he ran and Amy as she looks to where Sonic had once been standing and blinks a few times. In the regular version of this scene you never see her blink and the additional animation of the dust is also lost. Instead of showing her blinking and the dust moving the scene is abruptly cut as Amy looks up from her hands.

    I don't know why there is differences like this between the regular animation and the Mega CD / Sega CD version. It makes me wonder if the Mega CD / Sega CD version is the more finished version of the opening and ending cutscenes.