Akven on 17/9/2019 at 21:23
Ok, guys. I finally made ESRGAN pack for Thief 2 videos.
There are two variants - SD and HD. SD is for internal ingame using due to the fact that NewDark engine for now does not support resolution higher than 640x480. HD is for external viewing.
Original movies were converted to frame by frame pictures. Filtered using ESRGAN jpeg artifact remover model (there were a lot of compression artifacts in original videos). When upscaled 4x using ESRGAN manga109 model from 640x480 to 2560x1920.
After that downscaled to 1440x1080, filtered a little for better compression and noise filtering, fps was interpolated from 15fps to 30fps using InterFrame2 Avisynth plugin.
After that 1440x1080 resolution was used for HD version. And downscaled to 640x480 filtered images for SD version.
Videos are in original AVI container, video is x264 codec, audio is MP3.
Also I filtered whose interlace artifacts from original vanilla Thief 2 videos (especially in B16, CS10, CS15, INTRO). For CREDITS german soundtrack was added cause original video was with no sound.
Example of vanilla artifacts
(
https://imgur.com/a/xK3h9nf)
SD version for ingame usage. You can compare original and filtered versions in two separate Media Player Classic. Mine is much smoother and cleaner. Old refiltered videos I made before now obsolete.
(
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/29LX/5LeHwf7qM)
HD version
(
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/5B7M/5GHHRzJSx)
SUCCESS and DEATH videos were taken from Thief Gold ESRGAN Video Pack cause vanilla game itself using 320x240 videos from Thief Gold.
Second Release completed!!-Audio was remastered by musictaffer/itaffer for all tracks except for CREDITS, DEATH and SUCCESS
-Audio/video length desync was fixed, I inserted black frames at the end of most videos
-For HD release I added lossless remastered audio in FLAC in case anyone wants to make an MKV from AVI files
There will be a third release in a future, musictaffer/itaffer wants to additionaly remaster sound. But it takes time.
Now you can finally use this video pack.
Links are the same:
ALSOB16, CS05, CS10, CS16 can be cropped cause they have black borders so I made a config for cam_ext.cfg file.
Use this settings (find and place/replace them in cam_ext.cfg):
Quote:
crop_movies
crop_movies 0 74 640 332
movie_sw_scale_quality 6
movie_crop_exclude credits.avi+success.avi+death.avi+B01.avi+b02.avi+B04.avi+B05.avi+B06.avi+B07.avi+b08.avi+b09.avi+b10.avi+b11.avi+B12.avi+B13.avi+b14.avi+b15.avi+INTRO.avi
Yandros on 18/9/2019 at 12:38
Great work on this! Thanks for all your efforts.
Definitely use T2Fix, Tafferpatcher is outdated.
Akven on 18/9/2019 at 20:34
As always, found bug in SD INTRO video. Will reupload tomorrow.
Hitokiri-san on 18/9/2019 at 21:33
Looks great, but the I've noticed that the audio is kinda distorted (a good example is at the 00:46 mark in "CS05"). Anyway you could fix that?
Mat99 on 19/9/2019 at 01:46
Quote Posted by Hitokiri-san
Looks great, but the I've noticed that the audio is kinda distorted (a good example is at the 00:46 mark in "CS05"). Anyway you could fix that?
They are all broken... The funniest are B01 and B14 :)
And why all of them are 44.1 is the greatest mystery. Something went extremely wrong during PCM to MP3 conversion.
Akven on 19/9/2019 at 04:22
Ok, will look into it. One of the problem is that sound sometimes longer than video in original files. It's not an issue in vanilla, but nowadays muxing software cuts out this additional audio. So I had to stretch audio a little. Will look into another ways of fixing this, however it takes time. Had to insert black frames to the end of the videos with recompression of the video.
Akven on 19/9/2019 at 06:05
B01, B02, B04, B08, B09, B10, B11, B13, B14, B15 had this issue with mismatched (audio is longer) length of video and audio in vanilla.
Will try to fix
The problem is: it's x264 in AVI container, so I can't edit it without reconverting the whole video. If I want to reconvert the whole video with adding black frames to the end, I need to reconvert lossless filtered images, not already compressed files. Filtered images were too big (about 2-4 Gb for one video), so I deleted them. So I need now to refilter the whole process again with ESRGAN. It's about one to two days of non-stop computer working.
Akven on 19/9/2019 at 06:13
BTW, can anyone remaster soundtrack for videos like Child of Karras did for Thief Gold? I can provide original PCM files.
Mat99 on 19/9/2019 at 11:53
Quote Posted by Akven
The problem is: it's x264 in AVI container, so I can't edit it without reconverting the whole video. If I want to reconvert the whole video with adding black frames to the end, I need to reconvert lossless filtered images, not already compressed files. Filtered images were too big (about 2-4 Gb for one video), so I deleted them.
I'm pretty sure it is possible without touching the source Bx's materials. Just create a separate black-frames AVIs (the same res and FPS as Your Thief's versions + the right number of frames per adequate Bx). Then use "add" option in AVIDEMUX to add the blackness at the end and save it by set the "copy" (not encoding) in 'Output Source' field. After 1-2 seconds You will have the output file. You can add the audio in the same (copy) way.
Quote Posted by Akven
BTW, can anyone remaster soundtrack for videos like Child of Karras did for Thief Gold? I can provide original PCM files.
The originals are broken already (in many ways), but at least that terrible static noise could be... hmm... "repaired" a little to not be annoying. I'll try to not break them TOO much by extremely delicate and slightly cutting off the highest freqs. (as they are also part of the audio).
We'll see the results and decide if its worth, because maybe the originals should stay.
Drop me all PCMs as a package-file here:
[the link has been removed - got the package]
Akven on 19/9/2019 at 12:34
Uploaded to your dropbox original PCMs plus MP3 from German CREDITS.
I was trying to do something in iZotope RX, but I lack knowledge on sound.
Everything I could say is that spectrum is restricted to 11 kHz due to 22050 quality. And there is clipping in several files.
I may be mistaken, but I thing there was some trouble with 22050 and sound cards as they output sound in either 44100 or 48000 and will use linear interpolation for 22050. Or maybe with Creative - can't say for sure.
I will try to add black frames to the end of files. I doubt VirtualDubMod will do it, but I never tried Avidemux. VirtualDubMod cannot do anything to x264 stream it even does not listed in stream list.
