Wing Commander III Introduction AI Remaster Comparison

Channel:

Owen Davies

Subscribers:

40,500

Published on July 10, 2020 10:43:47 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNp6g1V7XYo

Game:

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (1994)

Duration: 11:22

520 views

19

The Wing Commander III cinematic intro FMV from the Playstation release using AI/Machine Learning to upscale it to native 1080p HD.

Red is always an issue when dealing with video image compression. Due to various technical reasons to do with the way the colour space is handled, red objects generally get around half the resolution of other colours - which is why the credits and the glyphs on the emperor's throne still look blocky. They're so very pixelated in the original footage that they appear to be geometric shapes and the AI actually tries to maintain it.

I think the improvements on the Kilrathi and Human characters are quite evident, though.

I took some of the methods I worked out during the creation of my Wing Commander IV HD Pack and applied them here with significant tweaks and changes. As well as upscaling the footage, I've also increased the frame rate from 15fps to 30fps, making for significantly smoother motion.

It's still not up to the quality of the Wing 4 remasters, but the source material is of far lower quality. The original resolution is only 160p, so this is an upscale of around 600%!

Other Statistics