Bonus Material: 'Restoring' The MGS4 TGS 2005 Reveal Trailer (Patreon)

The early days of the PS360 era cause something of a problem when it comes to preserving HD media of the time - and actually having HD media in the first place is challenging because actually capturing 720p video was extremely difficult, to the point where the Digital Foundry of the era built its own kit based on medical/military imaging technology. It also means that key assets of the time are not preserved in decent quality - and the TGS 2005 reveal of Metal Gear Solid 4 is one such 'missing' asset.

What's curious about this one is that it runs at 60fps in real-time in a world where the final shipping game could crash into the low 20s. It's widely believed to have been running on a prototype development kit that ran two GeForce cards in SLI. So what versions of this asset still exist?

We have a 480p60 version within a badly scaled 1080p60 container and we also have a 720p30 version from a Japanese magazine. It looks like there's also a 480p60 video on a US Official PlayStation Magazine demo disc (not sure if anyone out there can source that for us!). For the upcoming MGS4 video, we wanted to show this trailer as it would have been shown at the time but if you're looking for a stylised and really quite impressive 4K AI remaster, this one is pretty good: https://youtu.be/JnYZW0cT24U

What you're seeing above (and available as a 720p60 download below) is the best that we could do with the Japanese magazine version. At 720p, it offers the closest representation of the demo from a spatial perspective. Our first AI pass looks to remove the often quite horrific macroblocking from what is a 6Mbps VC-1 file. It does a pretty good job. The second AI pass interpolates back to 60fps. Turns out that temporal upscaling is something machine learning can do much better than spatial.

If an actual 720p60 version exists - preferably without the ugly watermark - do let us know! Attempts to remove that watermark have been challenging - other versions have different colour balances, meaning that a crop/overlay doesn't work.

Still, that's where we're at for now with this asset. The actual 4K60 capture via RPCS3 is looking very very nice!

Downloads: https://digitalfoundry.net/2022-04-20-metal-gear-solid-4-tgs-2005-trailer-restoration