Wing Commander 3 Extended Edition HD

The 182-minute epic Extended Edition for people who might want a longer version than the other ones out there. Some notes...

Errant frames removed: Owen Davies' excellent AI upscale of the footage had a glitch where other time there was an edit, there was a single frame of the AI getting confused and blending the two shots into one. I went through the footage shot-by-shot and removed these frames.

Cinematic action: Using the alternate cameras and playing missions multiple times to get the footage needed, I have cut the missions into more cinematic scenes. Shots outside of the cockpit are cropped to the same 2:1 (Univisium) aspect ratio of the live-action scenes. I added explosions and sound effects here and there when needed, and darkened the footage so it better matches the grim look of the live-action. I also used various music from the first few games (FM Towns for the WC1 and WC2 tracks) so the battle music doesn't get too repetitive. (Other than the cropping, this was all done over ten years ago for the DVD edition I made, and I didn't have the original footage, so the gameplay is pretty soft-looking and low-res, and my Windows XP machine that I used to capture the footage would sometimes lag, so the frame-rate occasionally drops down to truly awful levels like 1 fps, but it's only in a few spots.)

Hybridized scenes: In an effort to use the most footage possible, I sometimes cut both versions of a dynamic conversation into one scene. Most of the time I don't think a person not familiar with the game will be able to tell. I also did some various “creative” editing on certain scenes, such as using part of the losing-track final mission briefing before the Kilrah mission,

Scene transitions: I used on-screen text to give location information in certain scenes and also created a series of fly-by shots of the Victory to bridge some scenes to imply the passage of time and make some of the scenes flow better. I also scattered the TNC Infobursts throughout the movie to further break up the action.

New nebula: I think I only have one or two nebula missions in here, but for those missions I used some royalty-free color swirling footage to achieve the illusion of gas clouds/pockets in the nebula footage and colored it pink. The scene where Blair and Flash have a simulated dogfight has an added digitized/grain effect to differentiate it from “real” cockpit footage.

Prologue: Along with special thanks and logos to give the opening a more cinematic feel (it's not a movie these days without at least 30 seconds of logos!), I put in a short text prologue to at least give some story context for new viewers. The end credits now take place over stock footage of Earth, which I wanted to be thematic to show what the war was fought for (even though Earth's population is probably in the minority canonically).

Glitches and Issues: First and foremost, I am terrible at video games. My flying is sometimes embarrassingly bad. I played the whole thing with Invulnerability on on Rookie mode. I sometimes came to a full stop to fire on a capship and I realize how stupid that looks on the screen, and did other boneheaded maneuvers that even people who never played the game will be baffled at. There's a few-seconds-long chunk of mission footage with no audio where literally nothing happens that I just forgot to cut out. There's a really cheesy shot of a 2D Bloodfang coming at camera because I wanted to do some kind of cinematic reveal for it. Ummm...let's call it a Jaws 3D reference? There's also some rendering issues, rendering a 3-hour video on a cheap PC takes too long to be able to re-render whenever I see an issue.