Wing Commander 3 3DO Videos Are Wrapped In BUNs (July 11, 2006)

[ChrisReid]

Multimedia Mike has made some breakthroughs in the study of movie files used in the 3DO port of Wing Commander 3. He has written an article on custom movie file formats used for the 3DO in his multimedia exploration journal here. It looks like the core files used in both the DOS and 3DO versions are similar, but the console port uses BUN files instead of more familar TRE files. It all looks pretty technical to me, but someday this might help video artists cleanly extract the higher quality WC3 cutscenes included in the 3DO version of the game. Mike also recently conducted some research into Origin's Xan format which was used on most of the games with live-actor FMV. Thanks to AD for pointing this one out.

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Original update published on July 11, 2006

 

[Beckmen]

I don't get it, what's wrong with analogue import through an s-video jack to a video capture card? The quality isn't THAT good to have any visable loss through that tactic, is it?

 

[BrynS]

Well nothing is wrong with the analogue capture method in this instance per se and with a correctly calibrated setup and tweaked capture card settings, near identical quality (possibly improved with filtering and upsampling) video can be captured. The only difficulty with this solution is that most people and WC fans don't have video capture cards in their PC's (unless they have an HTPC or dabble in a bit of home DV editing or similar) and even fewer (by a significant margin) don't have 3DO consoles -- so it's a really niche demographic and even then, it's a time-consuming process.

While a lot of the technical wizardry that HCL and Multimedia Mike perform goes way above most everyone's heads, it's great that they're exploring these avenues -- being able to view/rip the WC3 3DO FMV directy from a PC application, such as HCL's WC Movie Viewer, would be a nifty addition to the WC fan's toolkit and great for those developing music video's, looking for reference images or just reliving 1994 with higher quality FMV!

Cheers,


Bryn

 

[ChrisReid]

I don't get it, what's wrong with analogue import through an s-video jack to a video capture card? The quality isn't THAT good to have any visable loss through that tactic, is it?

It really depends. I notice those sorts of things pretty easily, as I assume people like AD do as well. There's also the matter of having the files in the original encoded method, so not only would they look better, but they'd also be a better file size if we figure out how to extract and play them in their original digitized form.

 

[AD]

It really depends. I notice those sorts of things pretty easily, as I assume people like AD do as well. There's also the matter of having the files in the original encoded method, so not only would they look better, but they'd also be a better file size if we figure out how to extract and play them in their original digitized form.

Yeah, I can usually tell. Even with, as BrynS was saying, adding various filters to the capture to "improve" the quality you're really jsut upping the resolution and bluring and or artificialy sharpening the image... off of an analog signal no less which by definition degrades the original video quality. There will always be some signal noise in an analog capture (sometimes made worse by cheap hardware or other times barely noticable). It's like what happens when you make color photocopies of color photocopies. Technically it scans and prints the same resolution everytime, yet in reality 10 copies down the line you can barely tell what the original image was. So when you analog-video-capture it's alright, but when you then have to make your music video final copy from that source, the final product is once again a copy of a copy of a copy....
If you're going to add filters to make it supposedly look better, then the time to do it is in your music video, or movie's, final encoding stage. plus, you have more control of how uniformly those filters are aplied over the course of your video project.

 

[Quien]

I wonder if it would be possible to change the files into the TRE files used by the PC version? (Then reburning your WC3 CD's) in order to get the higher quality video on the PC?

 

[redtigra]

I wonder if it would be possible to change the files into the TRE files used by the PC version?

Or, if direct convert BUN -> TRE is impossible, maybe there is another way to integrate missing movies into PC game?

 

[AD]

Or, if direct convert BUN -> TRE is impossible, maybe there is another way to integrate missing movies into PC game?

I can't see a direct conversion working ever. The file format is similar - almost the same, but various things like certain headers within the movie file are labled different and the movies themselves have an MOV extention instead of the PC version. I recently sent HCl some 3DO and PSX wc3 samples to look at. He'll be looking into them once his school stuff is done with in september. If it's possible to figure out how to play them on a PC properly. Untill then it's hard to say how possible it will be to integrate them. Though there are, to my knowledge, significant differences between the way the movies are organized in the archive.