Forum rules - please read before posting.

HD Video Playback

edited May 2017 in Technical Q&A
Hey all - 

I have a bunch of pre-rendered videos in my game that are authored in 1080 HD.  As we all know, playback for videos this size has always been pretty terrible in Unity (unless you make some significant quality compromises).  Unity 5.6 has a new video player that support up to 4k and it seems to perform better (from what I've heard).  Any possibility of AC leveraging this new player?  I thought it was going to be an under the hood fix on Unity side, but it looks like it's a separate import option that AC doesn't support yet?  Video Clip vs. Movie Texture?  

I don't have Unity open right now, but just thought of this and wanted to ask the question!

...OR...if anyone has any tips on getting HD video to playback at quality/performance within Unity short of buying AVPro...

Thanks!
-z

Comments

  • If you can't wait for Chris to add it officially, I recently made a custom action which allows you to control the VideoPlayer component in Unity 5.6. It should have most you need.
  • You're alright in my book, @Alverik!  Thanks a bunch!
  • edited May 2017
    I'd also recommend you to check this thread too, mentioning a problem with playing video with the videoplayer component, which you may or may not encounter (but check it just in case, since @clairesquare already found how to solve the issue).
  • Oh, interesting!  Okay cool, I'll take a look.  Thanks, @Alverik!!
  • @themightyzq I've been working on a project that uses AC and the Unity Video Player over the past month, let me know if you run into issues, I might have dealt with the same ones!
  • Awesome, thanks @clairesquare!  I just did the latest AC update and was able to get video to playback.  I was hoping that I'd be able to just trigger the video and it would supersede everything in view and play back full screen, but looks like I still need to setup a camera pane and stuff.

    What video formats are you landing on for cross-platform?  H24 MP4?
  • @themightyzq I just found out about the latest AC update! Yay!

    You know, since my project is really heavy with video files and therefore is a pretty big build, I've only been focusing on making it work for Desktop. I'm using video with alpha channel transparency, so I've been importing it as ProRes 4444 with alpha and then converting it in Unity to VP8 by going to the Inspector on the video and clicking "Override for Standalone" and then setting the Unity transcode settings. I've also brought in H264 files and converted them to VP8 as well. I'm sure this will be fixed as the Unity Video Player goes through more development, but I was having some weird playback glitches only in the build when the files were transcoded in Unity to h264, so I had to use VP8. You can see what those h264 video playback Build glitches looked like here if you are curious:

    password: Glitchtastic
  • @clairesquare - Iiiiiinteresting.  Okay, yeah, I'll take a look at VP8, then.  That glitch would be a cool effect if you were doing a weird sci-fi game and it was intentional!  :-)

    Are you building on Mac and PC?

    Like the look of your game. Very Silent Hill meets The 7th Guest/Phantasmagoria!  :)

  • edited May 2017
    @Clairesquare Had to update flash but finally got to see the video. I must say the technique looks really, very impressive. And the actor was also pretty natural. Though, the presence of a real human being does make the player's 3D model's face somewhat creepy, lol. Maybe you could sometime try a similar technique with the player, or use a frame by frame approach instead (the way sprite animation is done). You could, of course, just animate the player's face too, but both options would take some work though.... Anyway, great work, even with the glitch on this video, it does look really cool.
  • edited June 2017
    @alverik @themghtyzq Thanks for checking it out! With transcoding to VP8 I was able to fix the glitch. I'm into how uncanny and weird it is for the 3D guy to be talking face to face with the video person! :)
  • @clairesquare @alverik - Looks like VP8 worked for me, although there is still quite a bit of quality degradation for some reason (a lot more video compression than I would expect)...hmmmm...Interesting.  Maybe I'm outputting from Final Cut Pro with questionable settings...
  • @themightyzq I got a lot of quality loss from compression from VP8 too (which was especially rough on my videos with transparency), but at least it didn't glitch out anymore in the build. I was bringing video files into Unity at very high quality (ProRes 4444) so I'm pretty confident the quality loss was in Unity transcoding to VP8
  • @clairesquare - Ah, okay, at least I'm not alone, then!  I might try a higher fidelity render from Final Cut and see if I can at least minimize the quality loss as much as I can.  Thanks!
Sign In or Register to comment.

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Welcome to the official forum for Adventure Creator.