Bink Video, why so shitty in every game?
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Hey so basically I've wondered about this question for a long time. Everyone uses Bink video in there games and it looks like fucking shit. Gears of War 3 looks fine and dandy and then it goes to a prerendered video and looks like compressed artifacted colour noised shit. What is the deal, why do people use this shitty compression it ruins the cut scenes for me. Cut scenes are supposed to look better than game play not significantly worse. I've been told by a programmer at work the reason people use Bink is because it is the only video codec that doesn't make the movie stutter if you are loading the level in the background, is this the reason we're stuck with this shitty looking video in games? All that being said I just tried Driver San Fran and the video is crystal clear high def and loads on the fly while you are playing the game, in some instances the in game camera is synced to the same point of the rendered video, never seen that before pretty neat. Driver figured it out, why do all other games look like shit when they play a video?
Replies
Next time don't be so snarky.
monster, your theory doesn't really explain Driver San Fran, they have a lot of car types and a open world game and a million great looking HD video segments. Even with the inferior visual quality of Driver compared to Gears 3 open world games eat up all the DVD space when it comes to content.
Like I said I was surprised to see good looking videos in Driver wondering why no one else can get this done on Xbox360.
Also I think they can compress any kind of videos. Not sure how it works with other codecs but I remember encoding some normal h264 stuff on After Effects and it complains if Im not doing standard aspect ratios.
Don't forget convenience.. it's always very nice to have someone to blame if things don't work. Pretty sure it isn't hard to implement some other video codecs but then you have another thing that can go wrong that YOU as producer/manager/admin have to make sure gets fixed by allocating already precious resources.
As for GoW3... their engine has it built in so I'd assume it is pretty natural to use it. Not everyone uses it. Personally I've mostly seen it on Nintendo DS.. and it looks kinda crappy but it is better than nothing. Haha.
The main reason that Bink is used in Gears and most other game is that the cutscenes can be played while loading new levels hence GoW has no real loading screens
much rather prefer ingame cutscenes
pre-rendered bink with ingame assets does not count!
I'll go ahead and say whats been on my mind, the cutscenes in Uncharted (at least the major ones?) are all binked or in any other way pre-rendered and played back right? mostly think so because of the "movie player" thing they have, where you can select any cutscene from the game..it'll load up instantly..either we're loading the environment, characters and what not in a millisecond or its binked..but I think there was talk about all being ingame?..meh..anyways