A Question about Wing Commander III

Tooner623

Spaceman
This has probably been covered, by someone, somewhere, already, but I'm curious.

I've been trying to play Wing 3 lately (having no luck with my machine and my KS version of the game, sadly), and I saw a few cutscenes. It's been years since the first time I watched them, and I am sadly forced to say that they haven't aged well. The interlacing and general resolution is plain out poor. That's of course, understandable considering the technical limitations of the time.

But something occurred to me. How was Wing Commander III shot? Theoretically, if it was shot on film, would perhaps someone at Origin along the line thought to carefully archive those reels? Could a high-resolution encoding be a possibility?

Like I said, I'm sure someone knows these answers out there. I'd just like to satisfy my curiosity.
 
I beleive they tested some footage on film but the game was shot on tape. There should be master tapes around somewhere but the quality will be somewhat limited. Also, once you increase the quality, the fakeness of the backgrounds and kilrath will be more apparent. That said, the PSX and 3DO versions both were recompressed from the masters and have better quality video than the PC version.
 
Well, I knew that the fake backgrounds would become more apparent, but yet my interest was there. :)

Nonetheless, thanks for the answer. I'll have to dig around to see the "higher quality" PSX version.
 
If you haven't seen, WC4/Prophecy did get high quality versions released on DVD (they were shot on film). You can tell certain things are more fake, but that certainly doesn't bother me - just being able to see the existing stuff in greater detail is wonderful.

PC WC3 was compressed a good bit. The increased number of colors and fewer pixeling issues on the console versions is pretty nice. In theory you could redo the game with the existing tapes, and it's be a decent step up, but it's quite an extremely unlikely scenario.
 
Well, yeah, I have the WC4 DVD and the Prophecy DVD files.

BUT, if they were shot on film, there should be even *higher* quality versions out there, which does interest me.
 
Well, yeah, I have the WC4 DVD and the Prophecy DVD files.

BUT, if they were shot on film, there should be even *higher* quality versions out there, which does interest me.

It might exist if it's been preserved somewhere, but it's a tough one to put too much thought into at this point. The DVD version of Prophecy took ten years to get, and we had leads to follow and knew that one was out there to begin with.
 
Fair point. As I said, this is little more than idle musings. Though it would be nice if those all turned up one day.
 
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