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I'm trying to make a fake Sega CD game (in the form of fake screenshots, mock videos and other materials) and I wanna know how to make videos with Sony Vegas that look like Sega CD videos, particularly those from such games as Night Trap and Dracula Unleashed.

I mean, how do I change the color pallete to 64 colors? How do I give it that grainy look?

Try any decent video toaster?

I'm sure you can find some basic plugins to bring down the color palette. If you've got the basic version you can try just boosting the contrast to decrease colors and than using a second contrast fx to bring it down.

Your best bet would be to find a program than can convert your program to Cinepak format. That's what the Sega-CD used.

Failing that, try the following:

Do all of your editing. (Actually, you may want to test this method without going through all the trouble of editing everything perfectly.

Downsample your video to about 160x120 resolution, about fifteen frames per second. I'm guessing you can do this in Sony Vegas.

Rip out the audio track from your video. I'm guessing you can do this in vegas.

Next, convert those images to an animated gif. You probably can't do that in Sony Vegas, but I'm not sure what method would be best. You can either try to save out your video into a series of jpegs and then convert them to gif and then put those together into an animated gif or you can find a converter that will turn the avi directly into a gif. If possible, find one with an option to limit it to a 64-color gif. This will give the video the graininess you're seeking, as a decent gif encoder will perform dithering so simulate colors not in its palate.

Now, use another freeware program (I know at least one exists, but you'll have to find it yourself) to turn the animated gif back into a video file.

Finally, make sure the video framerate is set properly and add the audio back in. This should give you a good approximation of the Sega-CD video.

You should probably also downsample the audio to 11kHz.

Also, I'm not sure what your budget is, but cut it in half. That should help give it the sega cd feel.

Jrecee wrote:Also, I'm not sure what your budget is, but cut it in half. That should help give it the sega cd feel.

lol that made my night.

Compress, compress, compress!!!

What video editing software are you using?

Sony Vegas, like he said in the OP.

Anyway, Limewater's got the right idea, but I THINK Vegas can export to image sequences--it should be pretty easy from there to bring your colors down in the settings for that export or by batch processing your sequence in an image editor, then re-importing into Vegas to export.

Funk, E wrote:Sony Vegas, like he said in the OP.

Anyway, Limewater's got the right idea, but I THINK Vegas can export to image sequences--it should be pretty easy from there to bring your colors down in the settings for that export or by batch processing your sequence in an image editor, then re-importing into Vegas to export.

If that's the case, all the better. Export to an image sequence and do a batch job to convert each frame to a .gif. You probably have better options on color-depth anyway, since you only want 64 colors.

The reason I am specifying gif format is because of the way the SegaCD handled video. It used the Cinepak codec, which used a vector quantizer. This is a very different method than that used by most modern video codecs. It's a big part of the reason why the games looked so grainy.

Apparently the codec is available here:

http://www.probo.com/cinepak.htm

I have not experimented with it, but it may solve the problem.

But, if that method fails, the graininess of gif imagery will probably be the best bet for a good substitute.