I’ve always been kind of curious about Final Fantasy. It’s been around for so long and seems to have been a lot of different things to different players over the years. Since I got my PS5 and re-upped my PS Plus subscription, I got access to Final Fantasy VII Remake – a shiny new version of (probably) the most talked about game in the franchise and decided now was the time to dip a toe into this series.

I know there are a lot of dissenting options that VII isn’t actually all that great. It sounds very much like a band that’s been around for a while with a divided fanbase that stopped listening after a certain point. The series evolving and changing every time seems like one of its strengths even if that means some fans fall off of it.

I tried to inject a little more humor and personality into the video than usual. I’ve mostly stuck to pure analysis in the past. There are a lot of people who mix humor and serious critique together well but I would be foolish to think that’s easy to pull off. Final Fantasy is often goofy though so it was appropriate to bring a little goofiness into the video, I think. And, as I said, I am not well versed in the series so I can’t do the kind of analysis I can with say, Batman… which I need to get back to soon.

On the production end of things, my workflow is continuing to evolve with 4K as the new standard going forward* – for the most part. There are some lingering older projects that have already been captured in regular old HD and I don’t foresee going back to re-capture the footage.

4K is easy. It’s just a lot of space and demand on hardware – but it’s very doable. HDR, on the other hand, is a massive headache. I may write a separate post or even make a video about a game capture HDR workflow at some point. Mine is still not perfected but it’s getting better… I think?

The Final Fantasy VII Remake footage in this video was all captured in HDR but the final video is SDR. I still haven’t figured out that last piece of the workflow to actually put videos out in HDR while still looking “right” in SDR. That’s the next step but I’m trying to keep some sort of pace for the video content. Only so much of the production time can go to researching the workflow.

Remake has a really nice HDR implementation, I think. And I was looking at HDR footage the entire time while I was editing which I then had to conform to SDR at the end. Tragic. Maybe next time… but probably not.

* If the video isn’t available in 4K yet, it’s because YouTube is very slow to process 4K versions of videos – at least for tiny insignificant little channels like mine.