Why Do Cut Scenes in PC Games Look Bad?

[nihilite]

They look like they're in 360p in every-single-game. I remember when I played final fantasy 13 (ah, bad comparison) a year and a half ago on my pc, using my pc monitor, and they looked fantastic. Whenever I play a game such as Arkham City or Deus Ex they look 10x worse than the actual game.

So, Why Do Cut Scenes in PC Games Look Bad?

 

[jaguarskx]

Because they are encoded videos at low resolution and then stretch to fill your screen. Most likely they are Bink videos. Bink doesn't exactly do a good job at encoding videos (there are better video codecs), but it's been around for a long time and have been used in games for cut scenes for a long time.

 

[waspzz]

They look like they're in 360p in every-single-game. I remember when I played final fantasy 13 (ah, bad comparison) a year and a half ago on my pc, using my pc monitor, and they looked fantastic. Whenever I play a game such as Arkham City or Deus Ex they look 10x worse than the actual game.

So, Why Do Cut Scenes in PC Games Look Bad?

I noticed this as well..There a lot of PC games with bad cinematics..Usually the pre-renderred trailers really looked good but the in game cinematics is worst that the actual gameplay.

Best example is Deus Ex Human Revolution - it has a sick trailer that can pass for a movie but the in game cinematics look like the characters are taken from a Lego game.

Another example is Hitman Blood Money, there are others, I just cant remember..

 

[anxiousinfusion]

This is a bizzare reversal of roles for me. I never thought gameplay looked as good as cutscenes.

 

[JDFan]

As Jaguar mentioned -- they are pretty low resolution compressed videos because High res or uncompressed video would require a lot of Disk space which would mean more download bandwidth used to distribute the online version or more DVD space used for retail versions which cuts into the profit margins.

 

[nihilite]

Best answer selected by nihilite.