Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

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Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Mon Mar 12, 2018 10:36 pm

I've always wanted an HD version of the "Shenmue II Special Trailer" that Sega released at some point in the middle of 2001. I remember back then IGN usually had 640x480 versions of most of the trailers, but those have been lost to time. The only remaining copy that I can find is the low res-version on Disc 4 when you place it in a PC. This project was to remaster the trailer in HD.

Version 1 completed trailer:
phpBB [video]


My primary video source has been Mr357's Shenmue 2 movie, but there are several clips that are either from the wrong time of day, different in the final game (the lighthouse scene in Beverly Hills Wharf for example), or just aren't part of the 9 hours that Mr357 recorded. (7pm night transitions, Fengmei scene in the diner, etc.) Also, the font used in the trailer doesn't appear to be publicly available. A font search engine found me one that's close, but as you can see some letters are slightly different.

There are also some interesting differences to be noted in the scenes that do match. For example, the scene with Yuan and Duck Race Man in the basement of the warehouse, one of the random henchmen is different in the trailer. In some cases characters blink at different times.

This project has given me new appreciation for the time and effort required to produce a trailer, and it make sense now how time consuming it would've been for YSnet to produce a Shenmue 3 trailer for MAGIC this year. Putting together what you've seen so far took over 8 hours, and it's less than 2 minutes long. There are several scenes where things are chopped together not only in small bits, but out of order that they appear in the game. I wouldn't be surprised if the original version of this trailer took someone a few weeks to make.

I'm hoping to have a finished "draft" of the base trailer using the clips I have already have finished in a few weeks, then I can go back and replace some of the stuff that's inaccurate. I might also consider using something like SVP to interpolate the source footage to 60fps, but my current video editor actually only does 30. (There's a newer version that does 60, I just haven't had a reason to buy it yet.) I wanted to post the WIP here in case anyone's interested in helping to improve the accuracy at all. I can replace the font for example, if someone either finds the original or wants to recreate the existing text as vectors. Or if someone is interested in recording more 1080p source footage, it would save me time. Either way, I plan to finish this since it's over half way done.

What do you think?
Last edited by Sappharad on Mon Mar 19, 2018 12:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Mr357 » Mon Mar 12, 2018 10:57 pm

Great idea and excellent progress so far! This is very similar to the remake I did for the Shenmue I "Digest Movie" that can be found on disc 4 of Shenmue II. That was an interesting challenge since there was a lot of mismatched or out of sync audio. Did you get the footage you used from my YouTube channel, or the Dojo's (now known as Shenmue Fans)? For some reason, the upload on the Dojo channel is noticeably darker than mine, even though the file was exactly the same. You probably don't feel like starting over, but I would suggest using my upload since it more accurately portrays the look of the game, and it's easier to see stuff. If you'd like, I could look through my folder of unused footage to see if I have anything you need, although unfortunately I doubt that I do. If there's anything I can help with just let me know.
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:28 am

Mr357 wrote:Did you get the footage you used from my YouTube channel, or the Dojo's (now known as Shenmue Fans)? For some reason, the upload on the Dojo channel is noticeably darker than mine, even though the file was exactly the same.

I did not take it from yours, oops. It shouldn't be very difficult for me to swap it out for yours though. I split the entire thing into 10 minute chunks as to not overwhelm my video editor, so I'll know exactly which part of the game each clip came from. The good news is that I don't think there were any missing clips from the rest of the trailer. I've finished everything up until the part with Lan Di at the end and was able to locate everything. I'll swap out all of the footage next weekend and post a new WIP.

Thanks for recording so much.
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby BlueMue » Tue Mar 13, 2018 11:16 am

This is a great idea for a project!I know how much work it is to put that many scenes together, let alone playing to capture them all. Great progress so far indeed, especially on recreating the logos and fonts with their respective effects.

This may go slightly off topic but while watching through the video something caught my eye and interest.
In two shots the Thousand White Convent appears with its statue, wich is one of the victims to the censorship that hit the PAL version. They could've easily been sloppy with it and just take the original but nope, they put in the extra effort. Because... the video on the Japanese disc is actually different and has the real statue of Mary!

Image

Image

Video quality itself is also changed. The PAL version doesn't suffer from interlacing artifacts as much and is overall sharper. The latter does however have a slightly lower video bitrate and also audio is down from 44 to 32 kHz. And it has 3 extra seconds of black at the end...
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Mr357 » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:46 pm

One thing I forgot to mention is that when Jianmin hits that tree in the park in South Carmain, there's way more leaves falling in the trailer than what ended up in the finished game.
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Tue Mar 13, 2018 10:44 pm

BlueMue wrote:Video quality itself is also changed. The PAL version doesn't suffer from interlacing artifacts as much and is overall sharper. The latter does however have a slightly lower video bitrate and also audio is down from 44 to 32 kHz. And it has 3 extra seconds of black at the end...

Thanks for noticing that, as you could tell I was using the PAL version of the trailer, which I pulled from my own dump. I had no idea that the audio quality was lower than the Japanese one. I guess I'll have to acquire that version instead.

The audio was still much better than every copy I found on YouTube, since they're all victims of YouTube compression.

I mentioned this in the video description on YouTube, but I didn't re-create the mirror asset. I found it via google images on someone's DeviantArt page. It's not a perfect match for the original but it was close enough. The effects on everything though, that I had to do. The moving gradient on the Shenmue II logo is also missing in that draft, as I'm just using fixed images and applying filters & transitions to them. At first I wasn't sure how I could replicate that effect with the tools I'm using, but last night I realized I could just layer 2 versions of the logo on top of one another and use a transition between them to make it look animated.

Edit: I went to download the better version of the footage used from Mr357's channel and noticed that the new file was 3GB larger than one the I already had. As it turns out, the source footage I was using was only 720p and not 1080p like I assumed. I guess I should have noticed this since every time I added a clip it was in the center of the screen and I had to size it up, but it hadn't occurred to me. The next WIP should be actual 1080p this time.
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Thu Mar 15, 2018 11:52 pm

Edit 2018-03-16: Never mind regarding this first part, see edit comment below

Sorry for the bump - I'd usually edit except I have a question. Does anyone know of any Lan Di flashbacks besides:
- Finding the Wulinshu and Ryo see's Suming Zhao's name
- End of Disc 3 where Yuanda Zhu talks about Iwao and explains the mirror
- The bad ending

There's a brief full-body shot of Lan Di at 2 minutes 19 seconds with an outline of the mirrors behind him. I can't find the original footage, it's not part of the 3 scenes above. Was it one of the dreams from the first game?

Edit 2018-03-16: I just found it and confirmed that yes, the trailer scene in question is actually one of the dreams from the first game and not from Shenmue II. That should give me the material I need to complete the 'first draft'.

Instead of completely starting over, I'm working my way though the video again and replacing everything with the proper 1080p version from Mr357's channel. Additionally, I'm converting all of the higher quality footage to 60fps. I'm not sure if I'll keep the final video at 60fps or not, (or just post two versions) but let me know what you think. Here is a new WIP, only the intro and Dou Niu scenes have been replaced with 1080p60 clips so far. The audio has been replaced with the CD quality version as well.
phpBB [video]
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Mon Mar 19, 2018 12:31 am

Sorry to bump myself twice, I don't know what the policy is on that.

I've completed the first version of the trailer and edited it into the first post. I guess I'm done for now. I don't have an exact estimate, but overall it took over 50 hours to create the first completed version. There is still room for improvement, but some of it I lack the capability to complete at the moment. I did record some new footage myself which wasn't in Mr357's movie, but some clips are still missing and others I couldn't get due to hardware limitations (mentioned below).

1. The Fengmei scene in Man Mo Bistro uses upscaled footage grabbed from Ziming's YouTube channel. I tried to record this scene myself, but I guess you need to get Fengmei to call you Ryo before it will happen because I wasn't able to trigger it with any of the disc 2 saves provided by someone in an old thread. I don't have time right now to play through and record it.
2. The close-ups of Joy in Lucky Charm Qr. are in daytime, even though the bike parts are at night. This is a hardware limitation - I have AMD graphics hardware so I can't use DEmul with the "Auto Sort" option. I had to use NullDC to re-capture the scene in HD, and her hair is messed up. My primary goal was to get her bike with the lights on and I did, so that's good.
3. The Lan Di scenes at the end, the first few I found but the part with him actually doing the move doesn't appear to be in the game. I used what was available instead.
4. There were a few environmental shots that aren't from cutscenes. I replaced these with some things that seemed reasonable.
5. Everything has been interpolated to 60fps. This was done to the source footage, not the finished trailer, so it won't add unwanted motion blur to things like the title. I kept 30fps versions of all footage if there's a huge outcry over this, but I absolutely love the way the game looks at 60fps despite the minor artifacts due to the conversion process.

That's all I can think of right now. Enjoy the finished trailer. (In first post)
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Mr357 » Mon Mar 19, 2018 1:16 am

Fantastic work, Sappharad. As much as I hate post processing of any kind, I have to agree that the interpolation works brilliantly. That pan up from Ryo's shoes at 1:51 is so damn smooth! Props to you for all of the effort and attention to detail that you put into this.
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Nankeiro » Sat Mar 24, 2018 12:15 am

Do you realize that you have fulfilled a wish of mine???? I still remember waiting in the early morning, about 2 or 3 a.m., downloading this awesome trailer of Shenmue??? On a 56k connection??? It's true!! Really! I have it on a CD burned!! 640x480 is the resolution of that video... Always wished to have it on HD..... Thank you sooooo MUCH!!
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Sat Mar 24, 2018 11:29 pm

Nankeiro wrote: Do you realize that you have fulfilled a wish of mine???? I still remember waiting in the early morning, about 2 or 3 a.m., downloading this awesome trailer of Shenmue??? On a 56k connection??? It's true!! Really! I have it on a CD burned!! 640x480 is the resolution of that video... Always wished to have it on HD..... Thank you sooooo MUCH!!

If you still have the 640x480 version this trailer or any others, it would be nice if you were able to upload them somewhere if you have google drive or something. I can host them unless Peter wants them on this site.

The version on Disc 4 of Shenmue 2 is not the high quality 640x480 version that most trailers were also released in, and I wasn't able to track down that one prior to making this. I remember IGN Dreamcast having 640x480 versions of several DC trailers and most of them are lost now. YouTube won't do them justice either since its 480p compression is worse than what they were, unless I'm just remembering them as better than they actually were due to the passage of time.
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Re: Shenmue II Special Trailer HD Remaster

Postby Sappharad » Sun Apr 29, 2018 9:12 pm

Bumping myself again. Sorry.
phpBB [video]


With the announcement of Shenmue I & II, I think it deserves a trailer as good as Shenmue 2 got. I was thinking of using the Shenmue 2 trailer as a base, but replacing some scenes (especially the ones I didn't have good source footage for) with content from Shenmue 1 instead. Same music, might need to edit out sound effects based on which Shenmue 2 pieces get cut.

I'm posting this because I want feedback on the idea. Should I wait until after the game comes out and use actual footage from it, or would it be better to make this before the game is out to help promote it? How about 30fps versus 60fps? If we assume the remasters are 30fps, maybe I should downgrade to that.

Here are some of my ideas thus far:
1. Replace some of the Lan Di stuff at the end with corresponding scenes from the intro of the first game.
2. Cut the part of the Fengmei stuff in the middle and replace with Nozomi stuff from Shenmue 1. (Primarily because I don't have good footage of the Man Mo bistro scene anyway)
3. For the character faces right after the intro, replace the villains (Dou Niu / Yuan) with some of Ryo's Allies from Shenmue 1. (Nozomi? Chen? Guizhang?)
4. The missing environment clips from Shenmue 2 can just be replaced with clips of stuff from the first game.

I know when I put together the original remastered trailer, there wasn't a lot of interest in anyone collaborating, but in the case feedback would definitely be appreciated.
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