The strategy classic Command & Conquer is known to be reissued in a remastered version and fundamentally optimized. The makers of the cutscenes faced a special challenge.
Command & Conquer is one of the best strategy games of the past days, but was also able to convince far away from the actual gameplay. At that time, the focus was on the live action cutscenes (FMV), which were quite special at the time – and with Command & Conquer Remastered these posed a particularly great challenge for the developers.
In a developer update, the creators are now revealing how difficult it was to optimize these cut scenes for the remaster. While you can easily make all the other assets in the game to a certain extent, you cannot simply re-record the original cutscenes of the original.
The plan was therefore to find and edit the original recording in as uncompressed form as possible, but that's where the problems began: EA could no longer find the over 20-year-old recordings and was already convinced that they were probably destroyed. However, an administrator had saved these recordings elsewhere, so that the tapes ended up at EA Los Angeles.
But then there was another problem: The recordings were still not available in raw and completely uncompressed form in higher resolution than processed in the end. So the creators had to get creative and instead programmed a complicated AI algorithm, which increased the resolution of the original recordings by upscaling and also increased the frame rate to 30 fps. Composer Frank Klepacki, meanwhile, devoted himself to the audio tracks and thus contributed his part to the optimization of the original presentation.
The video below is going to be once again closer to the whole process. Command & Conquer Remastered still has no release date.
