[UPDATE AVAILABLE] - Improved clarity and corrected aspect ratio

-------- INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS --------
1) Unzip contents to a place of your choosing.
2) Open your game's files and back up original FMVs to another folder.
3) Open the extracted folder and then copy all ".OGV" video files from mod folder into "<YOUR GAME'S INSTALL LOCATION>\Tomb Raider I-III Remastered\1\FMV\HD"
4) If prompted to overwrite existing files then select "YES"
5) Open the game and enjoy new FMVs.

If these end up being used for other mods or other TR projects then please be sure to give credit =)

The original FMVs from the base game while super sharp in parts tended to come at the cost of smudging over details, having horrible-looking on-screen text, or introducing warping or ugly artifacts.

My goal here was to provide an upscaled collection of these FMVs but done in a way to balance clarity with detail preservation all encoded in the OGV format the Remaster uses, and at the highest bitrate that format offers.

Currently, the game limits us to encoding in OGV format video files and a 1920 x 720 resolution for these FMVs, meaning no matter which way you slice it these FMVs will look way better on smaller screens like the Steam Deck or Switch's and not so great on Monitors or TVs over 1080p.

Until that limit is broken or changed then the best thing we can do is try our best to make these look as good as possible on both small-screen devices and TV or Monitors that are 1080p and above.

That's where this project comes in...

The base for these upscales was taken from my PS1 copy of Tomb Raider 1, then ran through Topaz's Video Enhance AI's various models to try and produce the best picture quality that I could without introducing ugly artifacts. Then I used Adobe Premiere to correct the aspect ratio to 1920 x 888 and also went ahead and manually added new titles over the top of the original footage, using the same font the game does, to enhance them further.

I aimed to reduce noise and compression as much as I could without causing the AI to smooth over surfaces or add, artifacting or texture or weird details to surfaces where they didn't exist before. For example, things like the fibers on Lara's poncho or the text in Brother Herbert's book were things I tried to focus on restoring when upscaling.

Additionally, I tried to avoid overusing techniques like de-haloing to avoid the final image looking too soft or full of white bloom, and I have not done anything like motion interpolation to bump the frame rate up to 30 or 60fps.

I also haven't performed any colour correction on these FMVs either, which the original Remastered CAFE scene seemed to have applied to it, making it often look too dark and contrasty on TVs and certain monitors.

The result is a softer image in parts but one that is overall much nicer to look at in motion and on bigger screens.

Sadly without the source files for these FMV's any upscale efforts aren't going to be 100% perfect, and this mod is very much still a work in progress. But I feel these are good enough to release into the wild for people to use in their Steam, GOG, and Epic copies.

If anyone has any feedback regarding these then feel free to shoot me a comment here =)