bassoferrol on 25/10/2025 at 12:13

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Now we need the death and success videos and those specific cutscenes and proper thief gold extra three missions and also undercover and lost city missions because of the location of the talismans in the gold version.

Estel Randir on 25/10/2025 at 19:38

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One of the major issues with modern remastering of video & pictures is simply that how media was created in the past is often reconcilable
with how they are created now (analogue film vs digital pixel drawing). There are some amazing tools at our disposal now to be able for an average person to take a tv show or movie made 30-40 yrs ago that was released on dvd in 640x480 & upscale it to 1080 or better. The results can be fantastic & help to preserve the media for generations to come. But there are more disasterous results than good ones. Why? Because many of the people trying to remaster the media do not understand how things were done vs how they are done now. Imagine taking a 1970s tv show like Taxi remastering it with the latest AI tools, guides, optimal software settings, etc. Then when you look at the final result - all of the male actors who used to have unshaven hairy faces now have smooth faces and look like young teenagers. Half the eyebrows are even gone. The walls in the garage (which are supposed to be dirty) are now much cleaner / smoother. - now they are bland and boring. Why? Because the AI software & the person doing the encoding think all the noise (what filmakers call grain) simply must go. The person doing the encoding thinks he did a good job, because things are supposed to look super clean / sharp in an upscale right? A general fail. All the media I have seen AI create itself can be nice, but lacks in fine detail.

I am no deep expert at all this. But I have been a part of several remastering communities & have done a limited amount myself for fun. The old "analogue" (if you draw a picture on paper it's also analogue =p) & early digital methods of creating media have all the fine details in what digital rendering calls noise (dirt on surfaces, hair on faces, individual strands of hair on peoples heads, eyebrows, raised bumpy textures on surfaces, etc). True digital does not "store" details in grain. Everything is simply drawn. Detail has to be drawn in. This makes the modern methods incompatible with how things were done in the past. In the past things were not drawn, they were filmed as they are seen with your eyes.

What's my point? Exactly what you stated about having to put the grain back into your efforts because the AI took it all out (aka removed the details). In my opinion, this is one of the top problem with AI remastering & even recreating media from ground up. You have done a very nice job with these videos - this is one of the better attempts I have seen at this type of upscaling - these videos were compressed very heavily in the game (a lot of original data in the media is simply lost). Even with all your effort, I can still see some of the AI attempting to create its own bland idea of what things should look like (a few of the buildings in the backgrounds, etc). The videos I have seen where the AI creates how a game should look are truly aweful. Might as well go play the South Park game (bland simple, smooth textures). AI currently does not have a good grasp on fine detail without major guidance & adjustment from the person doing the remastering. Also some people may not know, but when upscaling from a low resolution to a higher one, the data does not actually exist to upscale. The software fills in the "holes" of missing image data by looking at the pixels around the "holes" and interprets what the upscaled image should look like. Which is why a lot of old / early digitized media cannot be upscaled unless you have the source films - not enough data to even make a good interpretation.

Keep up the effort & keep tweaking!