makes me wonder if EA has higher quality versions of the footage kicking around somewhere
There was no sign of any uncompressed footage in the material they saved after closing Origin. If it's out there then it's in private hands somewhere.
most cg movies are rendered out in 4096x4096 then scaled/cut down to what ends up on your home bluray/dvd discs.
Well, yes, but you're missing the important step that explains why that is: before 'most CG movies' wind up on your shelf they're first shown in theaters, either after being put on 35mm film or through digital cinema projectors (which have a resolution of, surprise, 4096x2160).
Wing Commander III was never intended for a higher resolution than what we saw in the game. You're overestimating the render power available, too. There wasn't processing power to spare for secret high res graphics. The next project, Wing Commander IV, had five times the budget and plans to do a very early spec DVD version... and the huge amount of computer time needed for the renders meant they couldn't go back and fix errors (like the numbering on the Vesuvius/Mt. St. Helens) and that they even ended up doing some scenes at a lower resolution for lack of time (like the Bearcat factory).
This *isn't* a CGI scene, though, it's a composite shot with live actors... so there's even less of a chance that it exists in some secret high res variant (this was the same time they were doing Star Trek: The Next Generation--on film--which is now proving impossibly expensive to release in HD because all the SFX composite work was done on video).
But this is WC3 we're talking about: as I recall, the live action was filmed on VHS - 35mm film wasn't used until WC4. The CG sequences would have taken a big chunk of time to render too, I doubt they would have done it with any great deal more resolution than the final product delivered on CDs.
Video, not VHS--VHS is a consumer home video standard (the 'H' stands for home, even). I don't know enough about the history of video tape, but my guess is it was recorded on something like Betacam SP and then composited at 640x480.
It may be my imagination, or the difference in camera angle/resolution/lighting/etc, but the figure on the right doesn’t look big enough to be John Rhys-Davis. My guess is that this is a 'proof of concept' image of some sort, or something similar, with stand-ins in place of the actors.
That's a very good point. Actually, I believe Joe Garrity has a 16mm film reel of exactly this test footage... maybe he can pull it out and see if it matches the figures in this update (there's also some test footage hidden on the SWC 3DO disc for some reason).
Oh, hey, and has anyone noticed that I had the wrong ship name in the original update? You should certainly point that out over and over.
