Determining the "Correct" framerate for Sonic CD's ending videos

I think that middle ground would be great if the music were to start where it does in the original instead of overlapping the opening sound effects. Or just if the music cue on Sonic's pose before the screen shrinks were properly matched, not sure how that would line up with the first part in this speed.

 

That's exactly what the current version is, the beat of him posing, the zoom, and the starting of Palmtree Panic all hit where they do on MegaCD. But because of aiming for that timing, you sort of have to start the music a lot earlier during the SFX since in the MegaCD version it's slowed down so severely.

 

Sorry, I made a poor reference. I meant the orchestra hit, which comes early in your version because of the timing you were going for. It's supposed to hit right when it cuts back to Sonic's face before the pose. Matching it up with the bad ending's Egg-splosion is neat, but it feels kind of off to me for some reason.

I'm thinking about trying my hand at editing the whole ending to the speed of the Mega CD version on a shot by shot, frame by frame basis. Obviously because of what you mentioned before that could present issues, but I think it must be possible on some level.

The thing that bugs me about it is that it seems like the animators only had music for the opening. You Can Do Anything is perfectly timed to the full speed opening animation, and the Mega CD opening is horribly low frame rate and severely chopped up, missing the intentional cues. But the full speed ending is not timed to Cosmic Eternity in any way that I can see, while the "finished" Mega CD version of the ending seems properly timed. As if more effort was put into making the ending look good than the opening on Mega CD. Although it's possible it was easier to keep more of the ending when it shrinks to such a small size on screen.

I would really like to see a version of the Mega CD opening that fills in all the missing animations and times it to the music like it's supposed to be, because I love the finished pixel art of these animations in game.

 

Personally, I think having it timed like the SEGA CD version is probably for the best. It wasn't a walk in the park to transcribe all of that animation to pixel art like that, it's likely that every editing decision was very careful and deliberate. Oshima was known for being very particular (he made the composers redo the music several times over apparently), for something as important as the animated cinematics, he would've had to sign off on the work done for it to have gotten into the finished game. How it is in the SEGA CD version is likely how Oshima wanted it (or at least as close as they could get within space limitations, hence the missing bits).

 

Does anybody have a source for the highest quality copy of all the opening and ending animations that haven't been upscaled? I going to try editing them to match the Mega CD timing but I'd like to do it with both the Origins video source and a non-upscaled, "pure" video source. Something that isn't filled with AI artifacts.

Also, how did they fix the frame blending in the endings for Origins? Were the blended frames just duplicates that can be cut out?