Final Fantasy 13 multi-disc interview

[AlNom]

1) The 360 version will have content that is more compressed (specifically, movies and audio) or it will have a lot of discs (5 I think?).

2) PS3 has a some padding there to help with load times, and those 3GB file sizes for zone and sys1&2 will be considerably smaller on 360.

Either way, it still ends up being around 4 or 5 discs on 360, which means it's more likely that the content (video and audio) will be compressed more. I'm not sure how this will affect the final product (if at all) but it'll be interesting to see the differences in that specific content (FMV cutscenes).

Yeah, 5 DL-DVD 360 discs just for FMV alone... probably not a great idea on a couple levels. And it's not like 720p downsamples of the CGI & in-engine renders would be the end of the world.

It will certainly be interesting to get a file structure dump even after they reveal the number of discs.

 

[DrJay24]

I would hope Square-Enix were smart enough to ultilize DXTC texture compression on the X360 as it would afford greater compression with near lossless quality. Although since PS3 doesn't support it, they may not have used it since it was developed for PS3 first.

The PS3 supports S3TC and wiki says "S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) (sometimes also called DXTn or DXTC)". Not that texture compression would be a silver bullet for a game heavy in FMV.

 

[AlNom]

I'm guessing he means the normal compression, 3Dc+ and other related xenos exclusive formats. Although I'm not sure it'd be much help given that quite lot of the textures seem to not be normal maps (but hey.. I haven't seen the entire game yet!)

 

[tha_con]

Yeah, 5 DL-DVD 360 discs just for FMV alone... probably not a great idea on a couple levels. And it's not like 720p downsamples of the CGI & in-engine renders would be the end of the world.

It will certainly be interesting to get a file structure dump even after they reveal the number of discs.

Has anyone been able to get a direct grab of the PS3 vids to see if they are in fact 1080p or if they are upscaled? I mean, 32GB of video @ 1080p isn't a lot of video (then again, I hear a lot of the cutscenes are in-engine, so maybe they don't take up as much space?). Granted, a lot of this is depentent on bit-rate, compression, audio, etc, blah blah. But I'm still curious, lol.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Has anyone been able to get a direct grab of the PS3 vids to see if they are in fact 1080p or if they are upscaled? I mean, 32GB of video @ 1080p isn't a lot of video (then again, I hear a lot of the cutscenes are in-engine, so maybe they don't take up as much space?). Granted, a lot of this is depentent on bit-rate, compression, audio, etc, blah blah. But I'm still curious, lol.

While Final Fantasy - at least on the PS2 - was always famous for it's spectacular pre-rendered cut-scenes, the series actually never had large quantities of them. FFX has a total of slightly less than 40 minutes. FFX-2 had significantly less than that and so did FFXII.

If you take away 8 GBs of the 32 GBs that make up the FFXIII disc, you are still left with a single layer BD disc worth of space for movies. That's about 2 hours worth of very high quality 1080p video with a bunch of high quality audio streams to boot.

I personally doubt SE created more than 2 hours of CGI movies, considering how costly and labor-intensive they are to make. I'd say 32GB is plenty.

 

[specwarGP2]

Casino on HD-DVD was 178 minutes minutes long. That's almost 3 hrs of 1080p video + whatever extras on a 30gb disc. So FF13 can have at least 3 hrs of video. I'm assuming AVC is just as efficient as VC1 btw.

3hrs of video seems like a lot... right?

 

[Dr. Nick]

I'm not sure if the people who have played FFXIII are willing to reply to this thread but how many hours of CG did they sit through playing the game. If it turns out that some of the in-engine cutscenes are actually streamed video there might be even more space savings if they are done in real time on the 360. Would also mean that these scenes likely would not look as good on the 360.

 

[shido808]

Just one comment with no kind of qualification whatsoever... we've no idea what he was saying. But bearing in mind how much of FFXIII is streamed video, this is the most likely culprit.

I am currently playing through the import Final Fantasy XIII, and I have to say that there hasn't been very many pre rendered cutscenes thus far. And I've been playing for over 40 hours now. The vast majority of the cutscenes seem to be in engine. I don't think they're videos either, as there are some minor slowdown during a few of the more demanding ones.

 

[Naptime]

30 GB of 1080p content with what pcm audio? That should be 10 to 15 gigs of 720p video with dolby 5.1 at 640Kbs I could believe even as low as 8 or 6 if your really aggressive. Really depends on if their is a lot of in-engined cutscenes in the game (guessing these will be harder to re-encode) and if the game is doing loading in the background when playing them back. Still looks like 4 discs is possible even 3 with some sacrifices.

 

[Rurouni]

I'm not sure if the people who have played FFXIII are willing to reply to this thread but how many hours of CG did they sit through playing the game.

I think this info is already posted somewhere, but it should contain about 9 hours of cut scenes, 6 hours of those are in real time. I haven't play it myself, but the info should be accurate.
Final Fantasy XIII's Cut Scenes Detailed at SIGGRAPH Asia

 

[2real4tv]

I am currently playing through the import Final Fantasy XIII, and I have to say that there hasn't been very many pre rendered cutscenes thus far. And I've been playing for over 40 hours now. The vast majority of the cutscenes seem to be in engine. I don't think they're videos either, as there are some minor slowdown during a few of the more demanding ones.

Supposedly a breakdown of what the blu ray disk:
http://translate.google.co.uk/trans...final-fantasy-x.html&sl=ja&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

 

[shido808]

How many minutes of CG have you seen so far? There seems to be at least 31gig worth of video on the disk. There is a chance that you haven't gotten that far yet. I know that I end up spending a hundred hours on average playing JRPGs while other people sometimes finish in 30 hours.

Well I'm in chapter 11 right now, and kind of slowed down my progress on the storyline to do the mission quests. I doubt there's been even an hour of CG so far, as most of them are fairly short when they do crop up. Unless the last few chapters have some really long CG cutscenes... (I've heard there are around 13 or so chapters total) I'm thinking the majority of the space is taken by audio, since the game has PCM 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1, and DTS 5.1. It's kind of odd though, since it's the only game that I own that doesn't default to the DTS track over the Dolby Digital one - you have to force it by deselecting Dolby Digital in the PS3 sound settings.

 

[Weaste]

Well I'm in chapter 11 right now, and kind of slowed down my progress on the storyline to do the mission quests. I doubt there's been even an hour of CG so far, as most of them are fairly short when they do crop up. Unless the last few chapters have some really long CG cutscenes... (I've heard there are around 13 or so chapters total) I'm thinking the majority of the space is taken by audio, since the game has PCM 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1, and DTS 5.1. It's kind of odd though, since it's the only game that I own that doesn't default to the DTS track over the Dolby Digital one - you have to force it by deselecting Dolby Digital in the PS3 sound settings.

Didn't Square state that there are 9 hours of cut-scenes and 3 hours of that is off-line rendered CG?

Having the vast majority of 32GB of video as audio would mean one hell of a lot of audio.

 

[shido808]

Didn't Square state that there are 9 hours of cut-scenes and 3 hours of that is off-line rendered CG?

Having the vast majority of 32GB of video as audio would mean one hell of a lot of audio.

Well I've based that on my personal experience, before I saw the breakdown of the files. It's just that it doesn't feel like I've seen all that many CG cutscenes up till now. Some of the realtime ones might have been videos, but then I've noticed performance fluctuations depending on the scene, which I assume shouldn't happen if they were videos right?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

So I'd imagine the X360 version would probably just make do with one audio track. Probably Dolby Digital or DTS, whichever one has the best compression.

I can certainly see PCM 5.1 audio taking up a huge chunk of space if there's the standard amount of Final Fantasy dialog in the game. PCM is uncompressed right?

Regards,
SB

 

[AlNom]

So I'd imagine the X360 version would probably just make do with one audio track. Probably Dolby Digital or DTS, whichever one has the best compression.

Indeed... And it's probably DD5.1 as so far I haven't seen any game using DTS on 360.

PCM is uncompressed right?

Yep