Crysis 3: Classic FPS Remastered (Patreon)

Hi everyone, it's Rich. Last week we produced a couple of Crysis videos on the channel but you can never have enough Crysis, can you? I 'remastered' our legacy Crysis 2 captures last week for Supporters, and here's where I do the same for its sequel. These were acquired on February 20th 2011 according to the date stamps on the original files - and they are part of what we like to call the Bierton Archive. Yup, Dave covered this one back in the day and our backups include a bunch of my early work, a big chunk of Tom's - and essentially the entirety of Dave's output. He loved to back-up his stuff!

For this FPS Remastered segment, we actually imported some of the newly processed footage into actual current #content - a clip or two made its way into John's video last week. But if you look at that, you'll also notice that there's some raw PS3 gameplay in there too - which brings us onto the topic of how we backup the files. Basically we have matched comparison clips but also more extended frame-rate segments. These were captured back in the day using a video codec called UT Codec, which is mathematically lossless, meaning that all data is entirely preserved digitally. 

In the present day, in the 4K era, the data demands there are so vast we have to use lossy solutions to keep things manageable (though performance data is captured pre-compression). We've moved on to what are known as intermediate codecs - yes, they are lossy, but they're what you might call 'visually lossless' which is to say that they're not perfect but certainly good enough. File sizes are dramatically smaller, editing is a lot simpler. Bandwidth on UT Codec lossless footage is around 100MB/s to 500MB/s. We can basically divide that by eight with lossy alternatives at 4K.

Going back to the original 720p UT captures, we can import these clips into our custom version of capture tool VirtualDub, which has an fps analysis filter we can access that generates the data files - put the clip and the data file into Premiere (the data file via another custom filter) and we're good to go. 

As for Crysis 3 itself, the game finds itself in a bit of a weird place right now. The best way to play the current version on consoles is via Xbox Series back-compat, which sees the game running flat-out at its target performance level. Unfortunately, that target is, um, 31fps. Not ideal and it's still sub-720p. PC? It still has a bizarre issue where performance tops out at circa 65fps, which is a bit of a mystery. So with all of that in mind, I'd say that Crysis 3 Remastered is not so much 'nice to have' so much as a 'must have' and I honestly can't wait to check it out. 

More Crysis content for DF Supporters? Coming soon. You'll get a first look at Crysis 2 Remastered on Switch - the raw gameplay we have that we'll use to construct an upcoming edit. We'd be running that publicly sooner, but John's taking a well-earned break at the moment! 

Downloads: https://digitalfoundry.net/2021-08-17-crysis-3-classic-fps-remastered