Evening Sonic Adventure changed quite a bit in development - I'm not sure the intricacies found in all those promotional discs and trials have been documented properly on Sonic Retro's wiki, but there's a good jist in the public domain about what the original plan was meant to look like. 640x480 @ 60FPS, wacky Windy Valley, dragons in the sky, various other little tweaks and etc. Unusually for video games, Sonic Adventure was only really known about for about four months before launch - three if it hadn't been delayed by a month at the last minute. It debuted in a special event at the Tokyo International Forum on the 22nd August, 1998, where Sega put their big guns on stage, talked some talk, and showed a video. If you were there, you got a goody bag containing a booklet (which has been posted on this forum before and I uploaded to the wiki a few days ago), poster, T-shirt, and other bits of guff. There was also a VHS released around the same period. It looks like this: "モギタテセガサターン 創刊号 ソニックアドベンチャー制作発表会 1998.8.22" It's quite important, as it shows a load of prototype footage of the game. And while it does exist on the internet, the quality is really bad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGNp3TujUzI (curtosy of Kiddo who kindly moved this from Nico Nico Douga) We've had screengrabs of this for years but nobody bothered to write down where the video came from. The question is, can you get us a better rip?
If I could be sent the VHS tape in the mail, I'd be more than happy to do justice. I'm always enthusiastic about promotional tapes with prototypical content in them. I've done many VHS digitizing projects including old prototype footage of Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast) running at 60FPS from that FUSE magazine, which I wrote a blog post about a while ago: http://okeijidragon.blogspot.com/2014/12/old-prototype-footage-of-sonic.html And I recently digitized footage of that Ruby-Spears Mega Man cartoon pitch back in October: https://youtu.be/tfoeasCeh44
Really nice work there, but I have to say that adding watermarks and changing the original aspect ratio with added borders (or adding/editing anything at all) kind of defeats the purpose of acquiring and archiving these things for historical purposes...
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever addressed why that beta footage shows the game running so much slower than the final build? It doesn't seem to be a frame rate issue, the game itself is slowed down. Was it intentional for display purposes, or even meant to be the actual pace of the game? Or had they not optimized the game to run on the Dreamcast hardware yet?
Slightly related: Giant Bomb recently started archiving VHS tapes the gaming press used to get. They haven't put up much yet, but they do have a couple of Sega related videos up already: a video of Rez and an Acclaim b-roll that includes a couple of Sega games. I don't think it'll have much Sonic stuff, but it should be worth keeping an eye on for Sega videos.
I don't want to derail the topic but wow, I'm so glad that somebody is preserving these in near-perfect quality.
Actually, other than the watermark, that's the best you'll get on Youtube, since they only do 60fps in HD resolutions, which are 16:9. Better that the actual video is preserved with all fields present (if deinterlaced, at least they did a decent bob instead of a motion compensated deinterlacing, thus they basically emulated the behavior of a TV), in proper aspect ratio. Pillarboxing like that is the standard way in the video industry to preserve aspect ratio when moving 4:3 video into a 16:9 medium. Upscaling to 1080p60 is preferred anyway, because Youtube at 480p does not do 60fps, and the chroma resolution is quite low. Literally the only problem with that video in terms of preservation is the watermark that crosses the pillarbox border. I would assume that OKei has the raw video still, and could do something like make a proper interlaced high-bitrate MPEG-2 file (which in my eyes is still the king for preservation).
It's worth noting that a long-term goal will be for Sonic/Sega Retro to host VHS rips in the best archival format possible, which from what I understand means a resolution slightly fatter than 4:3 because the format isn't straightfoward. YouTube is good for viewing but not so much for "preservation". That FUSE video is actually slightly less special than you think. Everything on there is off-camera footage of what was shown at the Tokyo International Forum - that is to say, if you could ever find Sega's copy of the original video, the FUSE coverage would be redundant. I think the public had to wait until TGS Autumn 98 until they could actually play the game. I imagine a drop to 30FPS was because they couldn't keep the frame rate consistent - it's not consistent in that Speed Highway footage, but then... maybe that was a bit that was played live on stage while the others were pre-records. I don't know, although the 60FPS bit was mentioned as a key feature. Maybe things are slowed down because the engine doesn't drop frames. Maybe it's a deliberate editing choice. But you might not have to speculate on these points - thanks to Akane we have significant from the Japanese Sega Saturn and Dreamcast magazines, it just desperately needs a translator to make sense of it all.
Keep in mind that any resizing from capture resolution can introduce horizontal softness, however slight. Most capture devices are close enough to the true aspect ratio to use the resolution they capture as-is. Remember, 4:3 when it comes to digitizing analog footage is not 640x480, because neither NTSC nor PAL uses square pixels. NTSC pixels are slightly taller than they are wide, making the actual 100% accurate 4:3 frame something closer to 711x480 (and most devices will capture 720x480 to ensure that no active picture is cropped from the left or right due to minor timing issues, either when recorded or on playback). PAL pixels are slightly wider than they are tall, making the actual 100% accurate 4:3 frame 702x576. Luckily, the difference between standard industry practice and 100% accurate aspect ratio is not large enough to make a visual difference in almost every single possible case. Thus, I recommend capturing NTSC material at 720x480 and either leaving the resolution alone, or cropping to 704x480 (both of with are standard DVD resolutions, and which will work on almost any device that can playback NTSC video). For PAL, I recommend capturing at 720x576 and either leaving it alone, or cropping to 704x576 (which is, once again, a standard DVD resolution). From there, I would either use MPEG-2 at a decently high bitrate (something like 25Mbps should be sufficient to retain all picture data, it's a common bitrate used in the industry) and keeping the video interlaced (allowing players to deinterlace on playback), or use a good deinterlacer to make a 50/60fps playback version which you can then encode in MPEG-4 AVC at a decent bitrate. If you go this route, I recommend keeping an MPEG-2 interlaced version around, sort of like how the Internet Archive does it, and you could make the AVC version a lower bitrate suitable for streaming/quick downloading, while still having the higher-quality MPEG-2 available for those who wish to have the absolute full quality, and with many broadband internet connections today, that 25Mbps is quite easily streamable as well (but not sure about interlaced MPEG-2 support in web video players). I recommend MPEG-2 for the best quality archival format, as it has very mature support for interlaced video, and almost any device that can decode MPEG-2 can handle proper playback of interlaced content. If you would ever want to make DVDs, you might want a version with AC3 audio and a total bitrate of no more than 9Mbps, but that would be a secondary concern. AVC technically does support interlaced video (it has to, since 1080i is a common format), but not sure about decoder support of interlaced SD material in AVC format (as AVC is generally used with interlaced content far less than MPEG-2). Aspect ratio support is pretty mature in both AVC and MPEG-2. However, for the streamable AVC version, I would almost suggest going ahead and cropping to 704 pixels wide and resizing to 640x480 for NTSC or 768x576 for PAL, since web players are the one area where I'm pretty sure square pixel resolution is best. Video processing is fucking complex. It's never just as easy as "make it this and upload it", because it depends on the use for the encoded file. Here's the source for my aspect ratio information. As far as I can tell, this is the 100% truth (that the industry sometimes likes to take shortcuts with, either for cheaper hardware design or because they don't know any better). Like I said, however, the difference between industry practice and 100% accurate practice is so slight that you won't be able to tell the difference unless you just really want to be 100% accurate.
I'd really love subtitles for that video in the OP. If we get a better version, will someone bother to make some? I've always wondered what they were saying throughout their gags, as well as Naka and co's commentary on the game and their trip to South America.
Another one of the pie in the sky thoughts is that we'd have transcripts of all media on the wikis (both English and non-English), also archived. What people do with this information afterwards is up to them - uploading to YouTube with subtitles is one option. But I mean this sort of thing isn't just going to "happen" - people need to step up to the plate. The internet is chronically under-staffed.
Hmm, what about archive.org? Do you know if it has the same limitation for 60FPS videos? That's where these things will end up being uploaded, anyway...
Archive.org doesn't have any real limitations on framerate, in any way. I used to upload quite frequently to there. They were favored as the streaming site for TASVideos, at one point, due to the easy 60fps support, before YouTube finally supported it.
Hmm, I didn't know that they accepted 4:3 HD videos without resizing them to 16:9. That's good to know.
YouTube only changes the aspect ratio of the video, if you add a tag to specifically request the processing change the aspect ratio. I forgot if it reads MP4 or MKV metadata. My recollection leans to "Yes" though.
Maybe it's related to this and this? They may have been using values "1" for frame rate and "2" for speed just so they could show constant super-smooth 60FPS.
I totally forgot people had discovered that. That makes sense for promotional purposes I guess! I wonder if evilhamwizard or another researcher can replicate it using this method to confirm!
