Hello everyone! This is the Opening cutscene from Final Fantasy VII, restored to 4K and 60fps with the help of AI and Machine Learning and remastered to HDR with AI. Oh boy, oh boy... This was a very fun cutscene to work on but at the same time very slow process, you see there are multiple versions of this cutscene through the history of this game, the original PSX version, the first PC release, the second PC release, and some of the subsequent current gen console releases, all with slightly different resolutions and quality... usually when you want to use AI you want your source material to be from the highest quality possible, so I had to dig up on all the versions to find the ones with the greatest quality and with the biggest amount of details preserved from whatever the Square original was. It took me almost to 2 weeks just to get my hands on all versions and compare all the cutscenes, the general consensus according to the wiki was that the second PC release had the highest quality fmv's and that the first PC release the worst, this was almost the case here, but after careful analysis while indeed the PC version where higher quality (and resolution) than the PSX, after checking frame by frame the scenes I concluded that the PC version was an upscaled version of the PSX with already some blurred details (like the flowers on Aerith's basket for example). After that I went to work not only on the upscaling, but cleaning the image, and also increasing the framerate, the original was at 14.98 fps (rounded up to 15 of course.) So interpolating it to 60 was quite challenging as the AI can sometimes make some mistakes specially when there so little frames in the original. The original was a 320x224 resolution cutscene, so in order to take it to 4K it was required more than a 900% increase in resolution, in this case to 2880x2016, 60fps. After all was said and done, you would think that was everything and so do I, but nope, the original PSX cutscenes didn't have the music playing during the cutscene... sigh... why? My guess is that in order for it to keep the music running once the FMV is finished Square decided to start playing the song from the music files and having it detached from the cutscene itself, so the PSX cutscene only had well the background sounds, but no music, and the PC version, knowing that it's a product of the more lazy modern square, I check and yup, as expected they took a halfway, the PC version has the intro part of the song, the Opening, but it doesn't have the Bombing mission part. So I have to go for my cleanest version of the song to fix this, from the Bluray of the FFVII Revival Soundtrack: https://vgmdb.net/album/86041 Once I've done all of that it was the time for the HDR mastering, please be respectful ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7O3Tj14ZU

So this is the 4th Cinematic of Disc 3, The Divine Dragon set free restored to 4K, it happens before you finish your first visit to Deningrand, and when Meru returns to the party with some information from the Winglies. This is one of those annoying 640x192 resolution cinematics just like the Phantom Ship one, so this one took a bit of work to get a decent result, nevertheless, here you have it, also in order to get properly the 4K version I had to upscaled all the way to 5K first for those of you interested. I hope you guys like it, I'm sorry for not posting lately but I've been a little bit busy honestly, I hope I can put more constantly in the next weeks, also I've started working in another project that hope you guys will like once it's posted :) If you like what I do here, please consider liking and subscribing as that helps a lot to grow the channel, furthermore if you want to support me consider sharing the video as much as you can or consider supporting me on Patreon. Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoy the video! #TheLegendofDragoon #4K #AIRestored #MachineLearning #NeuralNetwork #PSX #PSONE #PS1 #Playstation #RemaketheLegendofDragoon #Upscaling ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6N9JhLKXn0