Inside the Digital Foundry

We've Moved!

2008-11-10T08:24:00.005Z

Just a quick - and final - entry to say that the Digital Foundry blog has now been relocated. You can find it here. It's a nicer-looking, more feature-rich environment that I'm looking to exploit more fully in the future, but in the meantime, all the existing content, plus more, is mirrored there.
There's a few bugs and minor formatting issues to resolve, but everything's functional.
Adjust your bookmarks now!

PS3/360 Cross-Platform Video Update

2008-11-03T00:01:00.003Z

Yup, it's that time again, where Eurogamer is due to publish the latest in my cross-platform development features. It seems a waste to compile 720p60 HD videos and only use a fraction of the data in the actual pieces, so blog readers can download the full high definition renders, optimised for playback on dual core PCs, Xbox 360 and PS3. The line-up this time is...

BioShock: click here
Dead Space: click here
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: click here
Pure: click here
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows: click here
Midnight Club: Los Angeles click here

Similar videos for Soul Calibur IV, Mercenaries 2, Beijing 2008, FaceBreaker, Madden 09, Tiger Woods 09 and NHL 09 are available here.

New Xbox Experience: The Last Word

2008-11-01T00:01:00.004Z

I was privileged to get a sneak peek at the latest revision of the Xbox dashboard, dramatically entitled ‘New Xbox Experience’. The old Xbox 360 blade system has served the system well over the last few years, but you can’t help but get the feeling that the massive jumps in functionality since the 360 launched have crowded the existing front-end, leading to an unsatisfactory, cluttered user-experience.
The new dash backs away from the clean, premium-look of the PlayStation 3’s XMB and instead focuses in an unashamedly Apple-style interface, perked up with Nintendo-style use of clean, bright colours and cuddly, casual-friendly (dare I say child-friendly?) imagery.

Loading up the dash update is only the first phase of the procedure. Once it’s installed, you have an Avatar-less experience. You can still access all your games and demos, but before connecting to Live you need to download the Avatar creation tool – Live downloads have been cripplingly slow for me of late; I'd expect you to be downloading the secondary update a lot more swiftly than I did.

By the way, if you get blank boxes here instead of video players, press F5 on your browser to reload the page...

This cheery intro movie kicks off the proceedings. Yup, chances are that most of that download consisted of this HD introduction...

First things first. It’s time to kick off Avatar creation. It’s Mii-HD to all intents and purposes. Even the backing music has that Nintendo feel. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the inclusion of Avatars can only really be judged once software starts to take advantage of it. Note that gamerpics are still retained; they’re just not as prominent as once they were.

In the meantime, the Friends List certainly looks a great deal more attractive than it used to… a party function has been added, which I couldn’t use as nobody else on my Friends List has NXE...

My Xbox is the hub of the new interface. It’s basically the vast majority of the old dashboard built into one user-friendly system. Note the game artwork for Oblivion (the disc in the drive). That’s being downloaded from Microsoft HQ, iTunes-style.

The welcome panel is a new addition that spells out all the new feature of NXE so even the most mentally challenged will be encouraged to check them out. You can turn this off if you get bored of it.

The somewhat decrepit in-game OS feature has been substantially revamped and is far, far more responsive than it was.

Aha, so here’s the feature that everyone’s been waiting for: the hard disk installation. Yes it works, and yes it’s excellent. Yes I have edited the video as I'm not sure any one could stomach watching 11 minutes of progress bar action.

You all know the score by now – the game disc needs to be kept in the drive, but it’s only accessed once – everything else is accessed from the hard disk. The result is that the Xbox 360 is much, much quieter during gameplay. Play a demo from the Live Marketplace and that’s exactly the same level of noise you’ll be getting. The question is, what other benefits are there? Most Xbox 360 games are already optimised to cache to the hard disk – it’s the main reason why there’s only 12GB available on the original 20GB hard disk.
Although I’ll need to look at this a bit more scientifically (ie checking in stuff like pop-in on Gears of War or GTAIV), there’s no doubt that spooling to hard disk results in a welcome speed bump. Here are a few games I checked out:

And Finally...
Media. As far as I can tell, nothing has been changed in this regard from the last revision of the dashboard. It’ll still play WMV files (even Blu-ray and HD-DVD rips, with all the VC-1 codec extensions in use), it’ll handle XviD files just fine and its h264 playback is the same as it was too. PS3 has upped the bar when it comes to HD playback with its unofficial support for 1080p60, and it would’ve been nice for the 360 to least be able to handle HD h264 content over 12mbps in throughput levels, but clearly that’s just not going to happen. Those looking for support for the Matroska container (.mkv) are also shit out of luck.
On the plus side, Microsoft’s association with NetFlix yields instant dividends in NXE. If you’re in the US, you’re able to stream both SD and HD content. HD content is 5mbps 720p – basically the same as most of the 720p Blu-ray rips seen out and about, but encoded into WMV instead. Great quality, and it’s all legal. You’ll just need to have a whopping great pipe to the internet to enjoy the HD content.
What is disappointing though is that the picture viewer is still rubbish. It takes quite a lot of effort to make a bad JPEG viewer, but Microsoft has done just that with the 360. It’s always been awful, but you’d have thought it would’ve been improved this time around. Support for TIFF, BMPs and other uncompressed formats would’ve been useful too...

On the left is a Digital Foundry HD screenshot from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The picture on the right shows the shot being displayed with the JPEG viewer in the 360. I’m curious as to how you can decompress a JPEG and actually add blur.

Overall, the New Xbox Experience is a welcome lick of paint with a very nice range of functionality. There’s something for everyone here, with just those using their 360s as media players let down a touch by the lack of innovation in this area (though you have to admit that the Netflix tie-in is excellent – if you can get it). The install-to-hard disk feature is certainly a worthy addition in its own right, and my tests were done with a heavily used 20GB launch drive. The newer 120GB drive is most likely faster (being a newer variation) and obviously allows you to cache more of your games. I somehow doubt that it’s going to yield any additional performance over and above better loading times and quieter gameplay, but that in itself is a major boon.
Also worthy of note is the inclusion of 1440x900 and 1650x1080 resolutions for users of VGA and DVI displays. Content here is letterboxed to avoid the annoying stretching seen on most 16:10 displays.

Update: The Verdict
As a core gamer, I like NXE and what it does for me, and I can see that the iTunes-style interface is going to make the system initially more attractive and sophisticated-looking than the old-style blades. The only problem I have with it concerns who the interface is actually targeted at. Practically all this new functionality is clearly geared towards the enthusiast user, and yet the Avatar system is obviously aimed at the Wii market and I'm struggling to understand how it will be accepted or used by the 360's established userbase.
As it is, the new interface is initially quite daunting - not casual friendly at all, despite looking a lot nicer than it did. More than that, if Microsoft is looking to branch out and attract the Wii audience, it's going to need to do more. It's all about the games. Virtually all of Nintendo's output is geared towards a different user. Even its core games like Mario Galaxy include wand-waving bits so the non-gamer can join in while the enthusiast gets his Mazzer fix.
Releases like Viva Pinata are completely the wrong direction in my opinion. Nintendo's genius has been in getting back to basics and supplying software that everyone can identify with - titles like Pinata don't do that. More than a new dashboard, Microsoft Games Studios basically needs to completely change its focus, and I'm not sure I see this happening...

WipEout HD's 1080p Sleight of Hand

2008-09-25T06:00:00.003+01:00

Namco's Ridge Racer 7 has been the standard bearer for true 1920x1080p on PlayStation 3 since the system launched, and to this day nothing gets close to what this game is achieving at full raster 1080p. Sure, GT5 has a tangibly superior look overall but its mixture of 1280x1080 (in-game) and 1440x1080 (replay) resolutions precludes it from the discussion.
Sony Liverpool's WipEout HD is the first big game for a while to be touting true 1080p credentials and regardless of its technical prowess, it's stupidly good value at $19.99/£11.99. It's also a superb technical effort, great to play and accessible to a level that recent releases in the series have failed to achieve.
And 1080p? True 1080p? Well yes. And no. OK, most of the time, it is. I mean look at these shots... scrutinised and measured by the ever-reliable 'Quaz51' who cast his expert eye over a number of Digital Foundry TrueHD 1080p captures:

There's still something about Ridge Racer 7 that makes it a phenomenal 1080p game, but there's no doubt that WipEout HD is the better-looking 1920x1080 effort with some beautiful shader effects and excellent art direction. But what's going on the two shots below?

They're not 1080p in the sense that the resolution is no longer 1920x1080. WipEout HD is now rendering at 1280x1080 (with some screen tear to boot), which I'm fairly sure is the game's lowest resolution - but still a 50% resolution increase over 720p. So what's happening? Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference. It's an intriguing solution that works with limited impact on the overall look of the game (the tearing has far more of an impact on image quality - I'm assuming that kicks in when the framebuffer can't scale any lower).

The actual amount of horizontal resolution being dropped can change on a frame by frame basis: 1728x1080, 1645x1080, 1600x1080, 1440x1080. All have been seen in the Digital Foundry TrueHD captures. The shots above appear to be 1500x1080.
The dynamic framebuffer is really quite an innovative solution to the perennial 1080p problem. Even though we're seeing major differences in resolution, the human eye really will have trouble realising the difference when the detail level is changing so rapidly in such a fast moving game.
In short, it's making an advanced-looking game like WipEout HD work at 1080p60 and that's pretty damn awesome.

720p Zero Compromise Console Comparison Videos

2008-09-23T07:12:00.017+01:00

It's been bugging me for some time that the Eurogamer comparison videos I produce are horrendously over-engineered in relation to the actual end result, so I decided to make more use of the HD captures and produce download-only files that show the full resolution and frame rate of each game, running in realtime.
The first one I produced, Soul Calibur IV, was beautiful enough to convince me to carry on with all the others and incorporate the whole process into the existing workflow. Enough bandwidth has been thrown at these videos to make them look almost passable for the actual game running on the console itself.
The edited files are encoded into VC-1 using Microsoft Expression Encoder 2, and the resultant WMVs are playable on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and fast PCs (any dual core unit should work fine).
So, here are the links required to get your hands on the downloadable goodies:

Soul Calibur IV: click here
Mercenaries II: World in Flames: click here
Beijing 2008: click here
FaceBreaker: click here
EA Sports Compilation (Tiger Woods 09/Madden 09/NHL 09): click here

Don't expect scintillating gameplay here, nor expertly mixed audio. The clips are specifically captured to be synced for technical comparison. As it is, in all of the releases above, the actual gameplay is identical cross-platform any way.

Digital Foundry on the Big, Bright Screen

2008-09-18T09:11:00.005+01:00

Question: how do you go about displaying real time PlayStation 3 gameplay on a screen the size of a wall? That's the intriguing question posed by my new friends at Belgium big-screen specialists Brightboard. The obvious answer would be to use projection, but in daylight conditions, obviously this would be a complete waste of time.
Brightboard specialise in the use of LED screens - similar to the kind of displays used in football pitch ad hoardings, and also for displaying advertising in city centres. Such screens are absolutely enormous and require dedicated PCs to control the image. That being the case, direct connection from console to screen is not the solution - a capture card, interfaced with the LED screen's controller is. Enter Digital Foundry TrueHD Express.
This was a great case to work on. Brightboard sent me a copy of their controller software and with just a couple of registry tweaks to the TrueHD driver I was able to get realtime PS3 gameplay working with no problem whatsoever. However, without an actual screen to work with, positive results could not be guaranteed, so it was with some trepidation that the TrueHD Express card was sent to Belgium...

Success! Click on the pics for some idea of just how massive that LED screen actually is. Multiple screens can be daisy-chained together for an even more colossal image.

PS3 Media Playback Update

2008-08-24T19:38:00.010+01:00

First of all, kudos to Sony for producing what I think must be the first 1080p60 AVC file to playback on PlayStation 3. Posters on the AVSForum tipped me off to the 1080p download available at WipEout HD website. Encoded at 20mbps with peaks at 49mbps, it's a worthy workout for the PS3 - but it's a shame that the gameplay footage has so much v-lock screen tear.
The video is also noteworthy in that I could not match this performance initially whatsoever, despite matching its encoding profile as closely as I could using x264. It turns out that the video divides the image into 'slices' which PS3's Cell CPU decode in parallel... and x264 doesn't support slices.
However, the Mainconcept Reference encoder does and while it's horrible to use compared to x264, I quickly had 1080p60 material playing back nicely. I'll have to consider updating the Devil May Cry demo on DigitalFoundry.org to replace the existing VC-1 encode as I get the same quality at a lower bitrate and AVC is clearly more suited to the PS3's media playback capabilities. That's if I can find someone with the full version to do the encode for me, as the demo version watermarks output and I'm not paying $1,999 for an encoder that is inferior to x264 in just about every way.

PlayStation 3 WipEout HD supports 1080p60 (with one or two interesting technical tricks I might go into at a later date) and the AVC video Sony produced for it is well worth downloading and checking out on your own PS3...

Website Revamp Now Live

2008-08-20T16:26:00.002+01:00

Well, after lots of behind-the-scenes mucking about, the new Digital Foundry website is now live. Contained therein is a stronger focus on the hardware offerings we've developed, including a pretty remarkable 1080p60 demo of Devil May Cry 4's superb intro sequence, running from PC. Encoded into the VC-1 codec and optimised for playback on PS3, it's well worth a download as an example of the quality of final deliverable asset Digital Foundry TrueHD provides. There's a good-looking 1080p30 AVC file based on Gran Turismo 5 that should playback nicely on both PS3 and Xbox 360 too.
Also revealed is the first work on the notebook version of Digital Foundry TrueHD that'll allow for 720p60 and 1080p30 HD capture 'on the go'.
While putting the website together, checking the logs also revealed that many of the shots posted on this blog are being hotlinked from elsewhere - and with it, the astonishing statistic that 5GB (!!) in JPEGs were downloaded at my expense last month, mostly from MySpace mouth-breathers stealing the Kasabian images from a previous blog posting. The shots have been moved and if they're stolen again, they'll be replaced with far more 'colourful' images I'm not sure your mother would appreciate seeing plastered over your profile!
Not too much else to report otherwise - my personal time has been vacuumed up preparing video material for the Leipzig GC games event currently taking place in East Germany. I've visited the event in the past, and while I'm never too keen on shows like this, the conference centre's surrounding area is truly beautiful - away from the city centres, Germany is a lovely place to visit; like rural England, but with space to breathe...

1080p60 Video Playback: PS3 Supreme

2008-08-08T13:06:00.006+01:00

It's all very well having hardware capable of 1080p60 capture; the only problem is that once you have created your wondrous edit, the only playback mechanism available is a quad core PC running the CineForm NEO Player software. Great (incredible, actually) for event usage on a huge display, not so great for final asset delivery to the masses.
Sure, 1080p30 can be played back with much aplomb on both Xbox 360 and PS3, but all my previous efforts in getting demanding video working at full fat 1080p60 have failed miserably, with only mediocre 1440x1080 performance possible via the Xbox 360's dashboard WMV player.
PlayStation 3 recently had VC1 decoding added to its media playback arsenal and it's outperforming my 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad system, and indeed the Xbox 360. Easily. My previous 1440x1080 anamorphic edits which gave 360 'pause' play back beautifully on PS3. Handle the encode carefully and the PS3 will even stream 40mbps VC1 without a hitch!
Sure, there are limitations with Sony's console, as you might expect from a consumer-level piece of hardware bent over and molested at gunpoint into doing things it really doesn't want to do. In an ideal world, you'd want to use all of the encoding power of VC1 - in-loop and overlap filters, dequant, true chroma motion estimation, B frames, the works. But in dealing with 60 frames, the poor old PS3 simply can't cope. The answer is to turn off varying amounts of this stuff and compensate with sheer bandwidth. The amount you'll need will vary with your source material but for 1080p60 you're looking at the top end.
So... what's the catch? Weirdly, PS3 supports VC1, but support is patchy for the Microsoft audio codecs. Plus you need to 'Enable WMA audio' on the XMB, which nobody ever bothers doing any way. The answer is to demux the WMV, transcode audio into ac3 then plonk everything into a transport stream (.ts) container.
As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. My whole objective here is to get some semblance of the magnificence of TrueHD 1080p60 captures but playable on everyday hardware; getting that level of quality is going to take some time, so no downloadable goodies for now, but at least now I know it's actually possible...

Kudos to Microsoft for Expression Encoder 2 and its 30 day trial period I'm ruthlessly exploiting as we speak. It's based on the same code that produced spectacular VC1 encodes for HD DVD and Blu-ray, but it ain't cheap at $199. However, encoding quality seems to leaps beyond Microsoft's previous Windows Media Encoder offering

PC Gaming Renaissance

2008-08-03T16:10:00.008+01:00

I'm currently in the process of revamping the woefully out of date digitalfoundry.org website. There'll be new pages detailing all our HD offerings and streaming video rather than cumbersome HD downloads. Tomorrow one TrueHD unit will be capturing the other in order to create videos showing the new system in action.
I can't be using Ridge Racer 7 to showcase 1080p capture for the rest of my life, so I knocked together a basic PC out of spare parts lurking in corners of the Digital Foundry lair, then bought a brand new 512MB nVidia 8800GT for a mere £90.
The results were spectacular and the revelation clear: for much the same price as a PlayStation 3, you can have a gaming machine that massively outperforms any current console. Devil May Cry 4 with 2x MSAA at 1080p60 is spectacular - an inordinate leap visually over the console versions. So-called system killer Crysis? Performance a touch choppy at 1080p with all settings on 'high', but still perfectly playable. Scale back to 720p and once again we have 60fps gameplay. Unreal Tournament 3 ran without a hitch at the full fat 1080p60 and predictably, blew the console versions out of the water graphically: over twice as much detail and double the frame rate.
The irony is that as pundits confidently predict the end of PC gaming, we've finally reached a point where basic PC technology is sufficient enough to feed consumer level HDTVs with a graphical experience far beyond what the set-in-stone, unupgradable consoles can achieve. In my view, there's never been a better time to get into PC gaming, and it needn't cost the earth...

A quartet of images derived from TrueHD 1080p60 captures using the CineForm encoder. Clockwise: Crysis (PC), Devil May Cry 4 (PC), Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3) and finally Virtua Tennis 3 (PS3). Click on the thumbnails for full images.

Pushing Back The Boundaries

2008-07-19T16:57:00.006+01:00

An exhausting week with over 800 miles covered across the UK, but plenty to get excited about. First of all, I recently upgraded to CineForm's Prospect HD editing solution; loaded up Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and imported a few 1080p60 captures into the timeline. Lo and behold, not only is Digital Foundry TrueHD the only high definition capture system on the market capable of the most extreme resolutions and frame rates, it's also capable of doubling up as a realtime HD workstation.
Yup, 1080p60 streams on the timeline, playing back in realtime.... while conforming the audio at the same time. Bearing in mind that Prospect HD gives you change from $1,000, this is a pretty staggering state of affairs - especially as I believe that an overclocked Q6600 based system running in the region of 3GHz, combined with RAM running at 1066MHz will also do the job. It's a theory I'll put to the test sometime next week, but with Intel's new Nehalem hardware coming along, I'm all but certain that mid-range consumer level kit will soon be outperforming the current top-end server-based technology. And that's fantastic for HD, while posing interesting questions to those of us in the HD hardware market.
Secondly, a brilliant meeting yesterday with the engineers behind the TrueHD hardware. I went in with a wishlist of stuff that can make the best HD capture solution bar none better yet, and I was amazed at the response. Plans are afoot to include the analogue component support currently absent from the hardware, improve precision 24-bit RGB performance, introduce hardware scaling, and finally, I'm very confident that an iteration of TrueHD will soon be available for notebook users. Bandwidth and CPU limitations prevent full-on 1080p60, but 720p60... 1080p30... some level of support for precision, lossless RGB capture, all the CineForm bells and whistles. It'll all be there in a package you can fit in a travel bag.
And lastly, in a sleep-deprieved, non-stop week of action, I spent a fantastic day at Criterion Games this week installing their new TrueHD station, demoing its capabilities and helping out with their video encoding on the Crash TV podcast they regularly produce.
If you don't know, these are the guys behind the Burnout and Black videogame series, pushing back technical boundaries themselves with each new game they release. Any way, check out that podcast on iTunes if you're in any way interested in games development (search for Crash TV). In an industry increasingly obsessed with PR spin, it's refreshing to see a bunch of talented developers letting the customer into their world, withholding very little and having some fun at the same time. Having spent a fair amount of time with these guys, a lot of the content is almost back like being in the room with them.

Streaming Video Comes of Age

2008-06-27T06:44:00.015+01:00

A long break between blogs, but with so much going on behind the scenes, time really is at a premium. For the time being though, it's back once again to my Eurogamer contributions.
I was recently asked by new editor Tom Bramwell to introduce video to the Xbox 360/PS3 comparison features I put together for them. In theory, it should be easy: Digital Foundry TrueHD already provides lossless dumps of the HDMI ports of the respective consoles, so I already have the videos, it's just a case of formatting them courtesy of Adobe After Effects.
Well, no it's not. Matching up specific screenshots takes time enough, but synchronising entire feeds of video at 60fps is exponentially more difficult. And working with uncompressed video as I do all the way up to the h.264 encoding stage also takes a long time, but is important for features where the user really has to have faith in the workflow used. It's worth pursuing as nobody else appears capable of achieving 24-bit precision with games capture and more than that, they're often working with some pretty awful compression methods, compromising the quality right from the initial capture phase.
Bearing in mind the large audience these features attract, I think it's worth pursuing the highest quality results.
The video linked below basically took around 4-5 days of work (including time taken to play both versions of the game up until the end of Chapter One), producing two versions: one at 728x544 for the video Eurogamer site, and one at 632x400 to embed into the feature itself.

Click through to see all eight minutes of the original Grand Theft Auto IV comparison piece, including a fair few clips that were never seen in the actual article. Thanks to Eurogamer for hosting.

I've just spent the last few days working on the latest feature, five games (four with video) and you can see that here.
Introducing video at all was a tall order. Up until that point I thought that video comparisons were a complete waste of time; streaming video just isn't up to the job. However, Eurogamer's video player is state-of-the-art - as far as Flash goes - and definitely the best on the market if given decent enough material to work with. x264's HQ-Insane profile is used for the very best possible results and to ensure minimal macroblocking or picture break-up, I slow the video down to 50% or 25% speed. It sounds far from ideal, but as you can see from the link above, it works in that it gives you more time to analyse the video differences. The video is cropped so that one HD pixel is one pixel in the player. Another advantage of slowing the video down is that typically, streaming video online runs at 30fps. Usual form is to dump every other frame, but some games do not update at an even frame rate - so in many cases, video information is being thrown away. Using the slo-mo method, every frame is retained.
The more experience I have making these videos, the more I learn about streamlining the process. The GTA footage was done clip by clip, with both the embedded and Eurogamer.tv versions individually rendered. Now I have a process whereby all clips are joined together, rendered as one file, with that file then used as the basis for the smaller embedded version. A quick Premiere Pro edit can then be used on both renders to make both videos in quick succession.

TrueHD: The Proof of the Pudding

2008-04-08T19:17:00.011+01:00

So it's been a while since I've updated with progress on Digital Foundry TrueHD. While the core of the product has been complete for quite some time, there's been a fair amount of engineering work going on in the background to make the whole thing stable. I've been doing a fair amount of beta testing with a client since my January blog entry and I was surprised at how easy it was for me to work around bugs, but not so easy for someone who's never laid hands on the hardware before. Thankfully now, the system is very robust and I've got some great feedback on how to improve the product still further.
Overall though, TrueHD is now good to go, so it's time for a screenshot or two, this time with a difference. The left hand side of the shot shows a captured image using our lossless 24-bit RGB codec (which supports 720p60 and 1080p30). The right hand side shows the quality we have using CineForm HD (support for any resolution at 60fps up to 1080p). For a complete comparison download both images here. Yet another testament to the quality of CineForm HD, which makes 1080p60 capture possible.
If you're wondering why I have an obsession with Ridge Racer 7, it's because it's a superb way to stress-test 1080p capture. And pretty much the only way we have right now until more advanced gaming hardware hits the market. First of all, it runs consistently at 60fps - give or take the odd dropped frame. Secondly, it's full raster 1920x1080 while most PS3 titles that offer 1080p support actually run at 960x1080, 1280x1080 or 1440x1080 - if they support 1080p at all. Thirdly, it's packed with detail, fast motion, and zero anti-aliasing. All of these details combine to make compression an absolute nightmare - in short, it's the best way to put TrueHD through its paces.
So, with TrueHD effectively done and dusted, what next for Digital Foundry? News early next week. It's gonna be big, or rather small.

Our old friend Ridge Racer 7 on PS3 versus Digital Foundry TrueHD, captured at 1080p30 in full 24-bit RGB (left) and YPrPb 4:2:2 CineForm HD (right). Click on the image for the full picture.

New Hardware Announcement: Full 1080p60 Capture with the 'Digital Foundry TrueHD' WorkStation

2008-01-15T10:42:00.000Z

Earlier in the New Year I mentioned some exciting new equipment being worked on here at the Digital Foundry lair. Now I'm actually in a position to be able to make an announcement of sorts before a full press release goes out in the next week or so.
Digital Foundry TrueHD is the first piece of brand new technology we've been working on. The best kit available (soon!) for hardcore professionals and media outlets, but really targeted at games developers, it's an ultra high-end unit designed to be the last word in video games capture.
It's also the first HD system available capable of acquiring full raster 1080p high definition video at 60 frames per second, while simultaneously running an on-screen preview window scalable to any resolution at the same refresh rate. In this mode, files are encoded into the CineForm HD codec, which regular readers will know offers the best quality, spectacular compression rates and allows for cross-platform usage of the video files on PC or Apple Mac in all major editing systems.
Other stuff we're looking to include? How about enhanced support for full mathematically lossless 24-bit RGB? Digital Foundry TrueHD can capture 720p at 60fps with full 24-bit precision, up from 30fps on our previous hardware. Literally every single byte of video information from the HDMI port is captured with zero loss of quality. That 24-bit support extends upwards too, with 1080p support included at up to 30 frames per second.
So is the new TrueHD offering a direct replacement for the current portable DFHD? Not really. There are no plans for a portable version of TrueHD, but more than that there is no planned support for analogue component (VGA/DVI/HDMI only) nor interlaced sources - all handled easily with our existing product. So consider TrueHD a top-end device designed to complement Xbox 360, PC and PS3, while DFHD remains the best games media swiss army knife on the market - able to handle any input (SD or HD), any resolution, anywhere.
Screenshots, videos and everything will be released in the next week or two.

Cross-Platform HD Video Files

2008-01-05T18:54:00.000Z

It's difficult to write any blog entry about Digital Foundry HD without evangelising the CineForm compression technology we have used since day one. I recognised the sheer quality of the codec right from the very beginning of our project way back in August 2005, but its incompatibility with Final Cut Pro on Apple Mac has always been a concern, being as it is - rightly or wrongly - the industry standard for video editing.
CineForm has been working on the Mac implementation of its technology for some time, but just before Christmas I finally took the plunge and invested in a Mac Mini. Partly to see what all the fuss was about (my last Mac was a monochrome powerbook that died sometime in 1994!), partly to investigate just how good the CineForm implementation was, and finally because I like to dismantle electronics and the Mini looked like a lovely design (that PCI Express Mini Card socket is very interesting...)
As it happens, CineForm have been good to their word. Our captures open in Quicktime and Final Cut Pro with no issues whatsoever, and no conversion required. The decoder required for running captures on the Mac is free too, meaning that distribution of those captures is no problem at all.
Going into 2008, we have some pretty exciting new stuff lined up that's been in gestation for quite some time. We're expanding the Digital Foundry HD hardware options, and introducing some revolutionary new capture options - stuff that's literally never been seen before - but practicality, flexibility and sheer quality are our bywords and as such, CineForm remains at the heart of everything we do.

Digital Foundry HD .avi files playing in Quicktime Pro on OSX 10.5, and imported into Final Cut Pro. Thanks to the CineForm HD codec, Digital Foundry HD captures are not only small and compact with industry-leading quality, they'll work on all major editing systems on both PC and Mac.

World First? 1080p60 HD Games Capture

2007-10-17T21:50:00.000+01:00

Let's make no bones about it, 720p is a lovely HD standard to 'do business' with. Progressive frames and 60 of them per second to boot. I built Digital Foundry HD around this standard because it produces great results and is manageable from a bandwidth perspective - ie in terms of streaming gigs of data across a motherboard and bunging it on a hard disk. It's also uniformly supported as a standard across both next gen consoles and is easy to configure on PC to boot. All good.
Once you enter the realms of 1080 lines, things get iffy. 1080i genuinely works well on most HDTVs, but personally I can't stand it for the provison of HD assets - interlacing knackers any chance of extracting specific shots and it's harder to compress. 1080p solves those problems except bandwidth over 720p more than doubles. This then, is what is officially referred to amongst those in the know as 'a pain in the arse'.
Digital Foundry HD of course supports 1080p - indeed it's probably the only bespoke system you can directly connect to a PS3, 360 or PC to 'get' 1080p. But it is limited in terms of frame rate (typically 15fps max - fine for screens, not for vids).
So today, prompted by a request from Gametrailers, I got to work in making 1080p/30 and 1080p/60 video from DFHD a workable proposition. To my knowledge direct connection to the source and on the fly video capture at this level has never been done before, so achieving this would be a big breakthrough.
Achieve it, I did. There's the odd bit of technical sleight of hand going on (essentially we're capturing 1440x1080 and using anamorphic pixels on the encoding of the final deliverable asset) but crucially, it works and it looks great. And you can check it out yourself by clicking here to download a 1080p/30 capture from the portable DFHD unit, or here for a full-on 1080p/60 video courtesy of the monstrous desktop rendition of the hardware. Unzip and copy onto a decent USB stick and check it out on the Xbox 360's video player - which surprisingly has more horsepower for WMV playback than even some of the most powerful PCs here at Digital Foundry HQ.
The 30fps vid gives some small idea of the clarity of the original CineForm HD capture, but I'm going to have to research more to get 1080p/60 looking great on 360 and PS3 as a final deliverable asset. The 1080p/60 file here is a tantalising taster, but I'm sure I can get closer to the quality of the raw capture.
In the meantime, work continues behind the scenes at Digital Foundry for full raster 1920x1080 60fps capture from any HDMI, DVI or VGA source. Now this truly will be a world first, especially in the creation of assets that can be used nativel on Premiere Pro, Vegas and of course Final Cut Pro. Expect updates in the near future.

PlayStation 3 Ridge Racer 7 in all its majesty. Namco's insane drifting arcade meisterwerks never disappoint, and always provide welcome demo material for HD specialists requiring a 60fps source to muck about with.

Game Over (Yeah!) for Sega Rally

2007-10-10T12:44:00.000+01:00

I don't have masses of spare time to devote to gameplay these days (unless I'm being paid for it) but one title I was dying to try out was the brand new Sega Rally, which seems to have attracted some positive press.
Sega Rally was the finest racing game ever made on Saturn, a perfect symbiosis of brilliant track design and an utterly sublime feeling of driving over dirt and gravel. Along with Virtua Fighter 2, it's the zenith of Saturn gaming. Despite the temptation to knock out a basic arcade port, Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his AM3 team completely rewrote the handling system as the original coin-op version (which updated at 60Hz) simply didn’t translate into the 30fps Saturn game well enough – such was the level of dedication in getting the very best rallying experience possible out of the limited console hardware.
Sega Rally has a lot to live up to, and certainly, in terms of its graphics, it's a beautiful game. Realtime deformation on the tracks as you race over them is also extremely impressive and does make a subtle impact on the handling. The amount of content in the game also appears to be very impressive, as is the user interface – clean and easy to navigate with no loading, if somewhat bereft of important information.
It's just a shame that so much is wrong with the game – beginning with the plain and simple fact that it has barely anything in common with its illustrious arcade heritage. There's nothing I've seen so far that makes it a true Sega Rally game, as opposed to say, V-Rally: The Next Generation. More than that, inexplicably, two different handling systems have been included (neither of them feeling right), and the inclusion of bouncy invisible walls trackside feels like a relic from the PS2 generation - and the arbitrary positioning of those 'walls' with little in the way of visual cues is terrible.
Other major irritations could've easily been fixed: no restart option in the pause menu – do I really have to play through every event in a championship if I make an error in the last race? And what's with the car select screen – why no stats on each car? How am I supposed to know which suits my driving style, or why one is better than the other, or why I should really want to get enough points to unlock the next car? And what on Earth does that music sound like?
Gameplay itself is also too difficult to begin with – even on the very first race, which you'd think should ease you into the game. But no, one big prang and you may as well restart (after quitting back to the main menu of course and going through all the options again as there is no restart option).
Fixing all of this stuff wouldn't have been too difficult (invisible walls aside) but the bottom line is that the mindset behind this game is just not quite right. If AM3 were starting out on Sega Rally now with today's console hardware, I can't imagine they'd hand in software like this. While the graphics are undoubtedly superb, the dedication to the player, to the sheer gameplay experience, just isn't there. It's a serviceable enough rally game if you can overcome its shortcomings, but it's not Sega Rally.
Game Over? Alas, 'Yeah!'. I'm off to play PGR4 and The Orange Box.

UPDATE: I'm currently back on Sega Rally having finished Half-Life 2 on 360 as I'm covering this in the next Eurogamer 360 vs PS3 face-off. Progressed through the first wave of rallies and opened up the modified championship. Have lost the will to play on. There is a restart option in the other game modes, but not in championship. Why exactly? There can be only one explanation - it is an artificial way of prolonging the time the player spends in the Championship mode. Handling still doesn't feel good to me and the option of not being able to switch between the two handling models between championship rallies boggles the mind. Different terrain requires different handling - this is what the game is telling me. Yet it won't let you swap between stages. I'm just bewildered as to why a game that has so much attention to detail elsewhere frustrates me so much in terms of the basics.

Most HD games, including Sega Rally Revo, top out at 29.97fps with a 720p resolution. Digital Foundry HD's precision 24-bit mode captures every single byte of pixel info output over HDMI to the point where even v-lock tear issues (shot right) can be easily identified and picked out. Click for full-size images.

Xbox 360 vs PlayStation 3

2007-09-27T15:23:00.001+01:00

Earlier this year, Eurogamer's editor, Kristan Reed, gave me an interesting assignment - to start a rolling series of features on the site that would highlight the similarities and differences between the same games running on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles.
I guess I was pretty much the default choice, being the only freelance writer around with the kit required to produce the comparison shots that would accompany the feature, so I gave it my best shot. Once published, I have to admit that I was as surprised by the vitriol of the 'talkback'-style comment writers as I was by the success of the feature (which got a huge amount of readers - the main reason I carried on writing them). I was also amused to see links back to the screenshots in various games forums, where 'fanboys' were picking and choosing the shots they wanted to use in order to make PS3 or Xbox 360 look 'bad' compared to the other. Unwittingly I had been drawn into the mighty next generation console war and my work was prime propaganda material.
Hardcore players have always had a close emotional bond with their gaming hardware (something I understood well and indeed shared to a point while editing print titles such as the official Sega Saturn Magazine back in days of yore) and it's pointless arguing, so I just let them get on with it, and continue to produce the pieces as I see fit. I'm far more interested in the games as opposed to arguing the toss over the technology that powers them.
Regardless I still enjoy writing the features and producing the comparison frames like the Spider-Man 3 and The Darkness shots below - a good workout for the 24-bit precision mode of Digital Foundry HD, and a harkening back to the excruciating, borderline pointless levels of effort I inflicted on myself while editing a certain magazine known as MAXIMUM.
Any way, the HDMI outputs of the PS3 and Xbox 360 Elite are used here, with both systems set to full-level RGB (0-255) as opposed to the more limited video systems RGB (16-234). There's a slight gamma difference, but that's down to the consoles in question, not DFHD.

Comparison images of Spider-Man 3 (720p) and The Darkness (1080p) running on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, losslessly derived from the HDMI ports of each console.

Why CineForm Rules Supreme

2007-09-12T10:34:00.001+01:00

When I first started to approach other companies in the games industry with a view to licensing the Digital Foundry hardware, typically the only negative responses tended to be...

1. Why do you CineForm HD compression? Nobody else does and we want to use Final Cut Pro.
2. Why use compression at all? We want precision quality (this is a common attitude with games developers, who would fall in love with CineForm if they put it to the test!).

Well let's tackle point two first, with a very simply exercise. Take a look at the image below from an Xbox 360 Gears of War cut-scene. One image was captured completely uncompressed. The other was taken with CineForm HD. We've zoomed in on a specific part of the image and blown it up to 200%. This proves conclusively that while not mathematically lossless, you lose virtually nothing by using CineForm and you gain so much - easy integration with multiple editing systems, relatively tiny file sizes (anything up to 15:1 compression), plus you can capture onto a single 7,200rpm SATA drive. No more need for stupidly expensive SCSI RAID arrays.
Want some more quality tests? Download this ZIP package of shots. Open an uncompressed HDMI image in Photoshop. Zoom in to 300%, 400% - whatever you like. Import the CineForm version of the same image, CTRL-A, CTRL-C and CTRL-V into your uncompressed window. Use CTRL-Z to undo the paste, then again to re-do it - rinse and repeat. Now you're switching between the two images at a stupendously magnified rate. Impressive eh?
It's all the more impressive considering the chosen subject matter. Video games have little in the way of natural blurring (eg camera focused on the foreground, background out of focus) so it's notoriously hard to compress. Secondly, there's the sheer level of detail in games these days - another compression nightmare. And thirdly, two of the three games in the test package run at 1280x720 at 60 frames per second. Every frame is different, making compression even harder. But CineForm copes easily with any eventuality. No other codec I've tested can.
Point one now. Nowadays, CineForm HD is now pretty much the only cross-platform HD codec on the market. Digital Foundry HD AVI captures can be losslessly rewrapped into the Quicktime MOV format (the bitstream is literally identical) and now both PC and Intel Mac owners can use our captures. Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro - now pretty much all editors can make use of superior HD assets, with Avid the only hold-outs.

Gears of War on Xbox 360, cropped and zoomed in to 200% - uncompressed on the left, CineForm on the right - not that the human eye can really tell the difference. And the really scary thing? This was taken at CineForm quality level 'High'... there are two more settings offering an even better quality match. We simply don't need to use them.

Digital Foundry Moves to Blogspot

2007-09-10T18:14:00.001+01:00

Several months ago, the main Digital Foundry website was forced to move at very short notice onto another server. Unfortunately, during the process, the bespoke blog coded for the site became totally non-functional, to the point where I'm surprised existing entries are still able to be read.
I've got plans to make a series of changes to the main site, not to mention launching a new online presence dedicated to Digital Foundry HD hardware - the licensing of which has been very successful.
There's lot of DF-related news to impart, but in the meantime I've spent some time porting over the more interesting of the original blog entries into this new domain.

A Wii Update...

2007-01-22T07:33:00.000Z

The last of the next gen consoles to hit the scene, Nintendo's Wii system provided a few challenges for us when it came to high quality video assets.
The first major issue to confront us was the lack of any unifying EDTV or HDTV standard that all games conform to. The Wii itself does provide a 480p progressive output, but unbelievably not all games actually support it. Furthermore, there is no standard aspect ratio for the hardware either - some games support 16:9, others do not. So while the Xbox 360 and PS3 get by using two different support profiles (720p and 1080p), Wii requires double that: full frame and widescreen 480p calibrations, along with support for interlaced 480i and 576i - two formats I hoped never to work with again.
Still, thanks to some hands-on time with Wii thanks to a German licensee of our hardware, we were able to provide support for every single iteration of the new Nintendo machine's video output. Let's hope that over time, games developers all support 16:9 480p.

Click for full resolution 848x480 screenshot of Wii title Excite Truck, taken with Digital Foundry HD in the preferred 16:9 480p format.

Kasabian, Digital Foundry and Microsoft

2006-12-19T07:20:00.003Z

It's quite ironic that Digital Foundry's first mainstream non-games project should be for... Microsoft. Last week, the Xbox Live Marketplace was updated with the back catalogue of Kasabian videos in standard definition, with the latest single, Shoot The Runner, available as an HD presentation.
Digital Foundry performed the conversion and encoding for this project, taking the masters in 1080i/50 format from HDCAM tape, ingesting the raw footage directly over HD-SDI into a 25fps 1080p file.
The video was then scaled downwards to 1280x720 - the Xbox Live HD standard - and encoded directly into the appropriate WMV container.
It was a relatively painless operation, but the flat colour/animated nature of the video provided a lot of potential for compression. However, with an eye for quality, Microsoft chose to use the version we encoded at the maximum possible bitrate, providing a virtually flawless rendition of the original file.

Click for full-size 720p images of the Kasabian video, Shoot the Runner, prepared by Digital Foundry for Microsoft and the Xbox Live Marketplace.

1080p 24-bit Precision

2006-12-07T07:28:00.000Z

The latest Digital Foundry HD software is now ready, offering native analogue component support to the already impressive results from VGA, DVI and unencrypted HDMI. So now the challenge is to push our existing hardware further and offer additional functionality.
Just about all HD capture solutions at the moment including Digital Foundry HD are limited to YCrCb 16-bit colour spaces, and it has to be said that in most cases, this is absolutely fine. Every single screenshot in previous blog entries has used this mode.
However, the next phase of software development will be for those looking for ultra-pristine assets. We are currently beta-testing full, lossless 24-bit capture. It'll be limited to 30fps at 720p, and 10fps at 1080p, but in terms of ultimate quality, nothing else will even get close.

Click for full-size 1080p images of Ridge Racer 7, captured digitally with full 24-bit precision.

HDMI Capture with PlayStation 3

2006-11-01T07:15:00.000Z

It's always been my intention to make Digital Foundry HD compatible with every single video gaming source, and via its component and VGA inputs, we've been able to extract the very best image quality from every single gaming system we've tried.
With PlayStation3 having a digital HDMI output, this gave us the potential for lossless, pristine quality video - it was just a case of finding one of the rare machines out there and calibrating it for our system. There was also the small matter of HDCP - the copy protection system that Sony has inexplicably activated for games content as well as Blu-ray movies.
Debug PS3s (used to test games) have the facility to turn off HDCP and the results are spectacular - Digital Foundry HD instantly locks on and gives a pure digital transfer.
Last week Nintendo Wii was also calibrated, meaning that not only does Digital Foundry HD cater for all three new games systems with 60fps capture at up to 720p (480p max for Wii), it also ensures ultimate picture quality by using the top-end video output from all three next gen consoles.

Click for full-size 720p image, captured via HDMI.

HD Video: The Future of All Games Media

2006-09-03T06:56:00.000+01:00

I was lucky enough to kick off my career in the games business working on some of the most influential games magazines of their time - Computer and Video Games and Mean Machines to name but two. Right from the beginning part of the key to our success was to make games look as good as possible. That meant the best possible screen shots, no matter what the cost.
Back in the day, that required an expensive 120mm Minolta camera, a decent CRT, a dark room and the hope that the pause mode in the game was decent. Then we moved into the DTP era and frame capture devices.
Now we live in an age where time is indeed money and yet many (if not all) games media outlets are still duplicating work by first taking screen shots via conventional frame grabbers and then capturing video footage for internet media, cover disks and magazine work.
What if the same capture session could be used to cover web footage, screenshots and disk video too?
Digital Foundry HD footage is pristine enough to be allow one capture session to be used for both eventualities. The quality of our HD footage speaks for itself, but those same video files can now be scanned frame by frame, the user able to individually extract any single frame they want.
The results are screenshots just as good to the human eye as a direct memory dump (eg Xbox Neighborhood screen capture tool) but with the added advantage that every single frame output by the source machine is there to be chosen, making for far more dynamic shots.
So, no visible quality loss, far more dynamic shots, no more duplication of work in the media environment - Digital Foundry HD just makes sense on multiple levels.
Here are a couple of Xbox 360 shots taken from CineFormHD compressed game footage...

Click for uncompressed 720p images.

Half-Life 2 Demo Retired

2006-06-22T05:12:00.000+01:00

As we continue the process of upgrading our website, it's clear that our high definition page is way out of date and we'll be adding WMV and 60fps VC1 versions of our Xbox Live Marketplace trailers to the site. That said, it's a bit of a shame to lose the Half-Life 2 demo trailer we crafted way back in the day.
This demo was created in August 2005 to test our prototype HD capture tools and hardware. Since then, Digital Foundry HD's user-friendliness and picture quality have improved substantially. For our initial tests, in the absence of Xbox 360 hardware, our games PC was configured to mimic the output of Xbox 360, and we used this for calibration purposes - it was such a close match that when we had Xbox 360 retail hardware, we were able to get up and running within five minutes.
The demo was also a cool testbed for getting to grips with Microsoft's high definition WMV files. The three minute demo was eventually scrunched down to an internet-friendly 99mb and still looks superb (even running at 30fps).
So any way, while our Live Marketplace demos take priority on the main site, we've archived off the old WMV demo here so feel free to check it out.

Click for BMP file of this frame from the Half-Life 2 demo at the full 720p resolution. Quality was excellent even on the prototype hardware, but these days we work using the wonderful CineForm HD codec.