Come all and enjoy,

I have gladly and successfully after many errors and crashes been able to convert ALL of the CGI videos for this game so they are higher quality for those that would like it.

For example(s) here links to all the videos on my youtube channel available for HD viewing. In the comment for any of the videos you may find the url to download the actual source file I made of it in HD available for you to use in proper format with the game itself.

System Shock 2 CGI Logo Intro in HD!
ORIGINAL System Shock 2 CGI Backstory
System Shock 2 CGI Backstory in HD!
System Shock 2 CGI Training Intro in HD!
System Shock 2 CGI Landing in HD!
System Shock 2 CGI Year 1 Training in HD!
System Shock 2 CGI Year 2 Training in HD!
System Shock 2 CGI Year 3 Training in HD!
ORIGINAL System Shock 2 CGI Campaign Intro
System Shock 2 CGI Campaign Intro in HD!
ORIGINAL System Shock 2 CGI Ending
System Shock 2 CGI Ending in HD!
System Shock 2 CGI Credits in HD!

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Here is the url to download the new video formats.

To install:

Jest extract them all to your System Shock 2\Data\cutscenes\ folder and overwrite the current files(recommend backing them up)

They don't look high quality to me, all the compression artifacts seem intact, or not noticeably better at least.

Well wate for the DL to become available and watch ingame. + are you making sure to tick the video to playback in HD? Or are you jest letting it load automatically what quality to playback at?

Also for me personally with the HD versions of the videos I actually see less blur and artifacts honestly. Mayb not majorly but its deff less than default.

Um, these look like upscaled versions of the original videos to me (with the wrong aspect ratio, even). Didn't watch them all, though.

(edit)
Oh, never mind, I guess that's exactly what they are. I have been considering recreating the scenes in Blender and re-rendering them, so when I saw the thread title, I thought someone else had the same idea.

All I can say is screw the admins at SystemShock.org.

Especially Kolya.

Why? I went there and made a thread exactly like this there to share this all with users of that community and he/she came on and first thing they try to tell me is you cannot get higher quality out of low res material. Well if that were true then how come with games like the original Doom which ran at a resolution of 300x200 originally we upscaled them to run at resolutions of up to 1920x1080? I thought we did that cause it made it higher quality then.

Next he/she tries to tell me I have to retitle my thread. Stating it was misleading to use the same exact title im using here. I asked him/her how is it misleading? Please explain?

His/her response was then it should be no problem for me to point out how I made them HD.

I told him/her I did exactly as he/she and every1 else has said and upscaled them thats all.

He/she then took it upon his/her own power to go ahead without providing me with any real reason to lock my thread so now I cant get comments and then retitled it to sumthang even more stupid sounding that to me is even more misleading than the original title I had made it, scaled up original cutscenes.

Curious as to find out more yourself venture over here and find out first hand: http://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=4556

Basecally dont ever expect to see me try and come back there to share anything with any1.

Only way to make these videos closest to the HD would be to rip them frame by frame into a lossless image format (PNG), upscale them using S-Spline algorithm using BenVista PhotoZoom and re-encoding them back into a playable video. You can also try with a dedicated video upsampler/upscaler but what i've tried so far made it look like crap.
But i do know that S-Spline works and it does really well.

Yeah, honestly, I'm amazed by their behavior over there. Even if they disapprove of what you did (which, honestly, I don't care, whatever), they handled it in entirely the wrong way. If you want the System Shock 2 mod scene to come around again, how about not acting like assholes to new members, hmm? Just a thought.

Apparently they all over forgot what the definition of a remake/redux is and what the definition of HD is.

But w/e I aint lying or doing any false advertisement with this thread or any other thread I made of this else where.

& I hope many come and use and enjoy this from me to them.

The reason an originally low-res game can look better at high-res is because it is being rendered natively at that resolution. Sure the base textures are still low-res, but the pixel density of the screen and the sharpness of all edge detail is legitimately increased.

Upscaling a video, on the other hand, is precisely equivalent to taking a 300x200 screenshot of Doom and blowing it up to 1920x1080. There is no additional detail added. It just looks the same as before, but now really blurry. Oh and oddly stretched because the aspect ratio is wrong.

So this is what you actually did to the SS2 videos-- distorted the aspect ratio, wrecked all fine detail with scaling/sharpening halos, and reduced them to second-generation compression quality. Thanks but no thanks.

BTW, people might not be so quick to make fun of you if you'd bother to turn on spell-check in your browser. "Sumthang"? Seriously? Yes you are. Your videos are not HD. They are SD videos shoved through an upscaler.

Actually I didnt mess with any aspect ratios. Download the avi files and actually watchem as they are sposed to be and you would mayb notice that.

Obviously youtube isnt the best way to present the videos cause it, itself is the culprit for making you and others think that I messed with the aspect ratio.

Secondly you keep trying to say that upscaling doesnt sharpen anything which in on its own is a form of detail.

So I unno to me you are misleading more peeps here.

To be entirely honest, I don't really care whether the videos are actually high quality or not, my issue is with how you guys tackled this. If it isn't higher quality, then just say that! Say, "It looks like you've just upscaled the videos and added sharpening filters. That's not really true HD, but thanks for the thought". But instead Kolya comes in acting like kind of a jerk, and you support that by closing the thread and being snarky in your own post. That's not helpful, it's abrasive, unfriendly, and kind of smug.

Ah, so you're treating this like the Special Olympics.

Thanks for proving that arguing with you is going to be completely pointless. I can move on to less dumb things, now.

Likewise. When actual gamers hit up mod sites looking for mods to improve their experience, they DO care whether it's high quality or not. When someone spends time downloading and installing a mod, only to find that it's worthless crap, do you think he cares about stroking the ego of the person who posted it? No. No he does not.

In summary-- a healthy mod community needs honest, blunt feedback, not carebears.

You can render real-time 3D in any resolution and get benefits in the form of less aliasing, less loss of detail up close and in distant objects (if that detail was already present in the assets), a crisper image, etc. That doesn't work with fixed resolution images, like pre-rendered videos or low resolution 2D games. Essentially you did the same thing the game does by itself when you run it, upscaled the videos. Maybe the method is a little different, maybe it looks a little better to you (and apparently only you), but in the end it's the same exact images processed in a slightly different way to fit a larger area. Telling others to screw themselves because they attempt to educate you and wanted you to change the title because it's certainly misleading for people who already are educated and expect something more than upscaling (especially when there were people attempting to re-create the videos in better quality in the past) doesn't reflect well on yourself. Oh, and you can put any aspect ratio videos on youtube if you do it right, if you did it wrong then you should have told people that they shouldn't judge it by that, rather than expect them to know the youtube videos you linked aren't representative of what you did. It's okay to be ignorant, which you are given your example of a game like Doom vs pre-rendered footage, but acting like a child to convince others you're right? Come on. Oh, and there's nothing misleading about "scaled up original cut scenes", that's exactly what you have there.