Topic: Is game-footage usally hightest quality?

[Hemmorrhoid]

One thing that always interested me is that when we see screens or game footage on gaming sites of games supposebly evolved to their best graphical state also displayed under conditions that the best enhancing techniques are used?
Meaning that basically all footage we see would look only that good on a progressive scan tv that is supplied with component cables?
And I dont mean filmed from screen but direct feed official trailer stuff etc.

[EggyToast]

Usually, yeah.  They're from the development house, and the dev. team usually has the best equipment.  How else are they supposed to know what the things look like?

I'd assume most of those screen shots are actually from computers running the dev-kits directly to computer monitors.  After all, how else would they get the screenshots?

[Hemmorrhoid]

thanks, hope this wasnt a stupid question

so basically your only able to achieve the quality seen in the vids by using a progressive scan tv?

[MarioFoxZelda]

probably. i dont really know. try one of those plasma tvs those might make a little difference. all you have to do is sell ur house to buy one.

[Grey Ninja]

I sometimes see in game things that look better than screenshots I have seen.  The reason being that the screenshots are compressed all to hell to save bandwidth, and don't look as good as when the graphics are being generated in real time.  Also, the screenshots you see are often from early betas, and don't feature all the bells and whistles that the full versions have.

[Termin8Anakin]

I noticed that XG3 was infinitely more clearer when I was playing the actual game on my TV than from any screens and direct-feed movies I got off the net. It all comes back to the compression stuff and reduction of screen size to save bacdwisth. I mean, not everyone can view a movie that is made to be viewed at full screen, as opposed to getting a small sized movie and playing it at full screen.
I'm expecting F-Zero GC to actually look better on TV when I get it. Same with Metroid and Zelda.

[RickPowers]

This is why some of you shouldn't be answering questions like these.

NO, those screenshots usually aren't of the highest quality, "highest quality" being a rather subjective term.  Depending on the tools used, the screenshots are usually taken directly from the frame buffer.  While this does yield pretty "crisp" screens, it doesn't give you a very good idea of what you're going to see on your screen.  TV screens do some natural filtering and smoothing that isn't evident in those screens.

In fact, one of the companies I used to work with would run all screens through a Photoshop filter that would add some of this smoothing so that the screenshots would look more like what people would expect.  As far as I can tell, Nintendo doesn't do this.