Page 1 of 2. Page 2

Target renders. Bullshots. Pre-renders. Grading. Post-processing. A whole new terminology has built up within the games community to describe the ways and means by which game-makers are creating promotional material that may or may not actually look like the product we'll eventually be playing on our consoles and computers. Where did it begin, why are they doing it, and in the internet age where any kind of fakery and shenanigans is swiftly jumped upon, shouldn't they really be stopping it?

Of course, the truth is that massaging and manipulation of media assets isn't anything new. It can easily be argued that the situation used to be a whole lot worse: the old 8-bit home computer arcade conversions back in the eighties were often backed with screenshots taken from the coin-op source, where a "night and day difference" doesn't even begin to describe the gulf in visual quality. However, the popularity of the "bullshot", as it is now popularly known, really kicked off in the PlayStation era - and originally, I suspect, with the best of intentions.

Game visuals, when captured via frame grabbers, or dumped from the video RAM of the host consoles, are stark, digitally perfect representations of the game as the computer "sees" it, and somewhat removed from how it would actually have looked on displays of the time. Even the best, most precise progressive-scan CRT displays have a tendency to smooth off edges in gameplay, whereas the common-or-garden TV adds a whole lot of blur, all of which would have been taken into account by the artists of the original games.

Regressing back to my past life as editor of games magazines including Mean Machines, we actually opted to stay away from frame grabbers for as long as we could (until the bean counters killed the photography budget) simply because photographing CRT screens from within a dark room produced coverage that more accurately reflected how the games would be seen, and played, on our readers' TVs. Even in the here and now, emulator coders are working on bespoke upscaling algorithms to make the games of yesteryear run in a manner closer to their original look on our modern day, relatively ultra-resolution monitors.

The needs of the games media were a crucial factor in the rise of the bullshot, especially as the print media became of prime importance in marketing a videogame back in the mid-nineties. Whereas screen resolution was typically 72dpi (dots per inch), magazine production operated at anything up to 300dpi. Games could look a bit rubbish as a consequence, and the developers made pains to address that. With the shift to 3D, game-makers came up with more ingenious solutions in producing what would eventually become the standard bullshot.

Take, for example, the standard bearers in graphical realism on console, the literally incomparable Polyphony Digital. E3 played host to a couple of videos from the developer designed to showcase Gran Turismo on PS3 and PSP. The thing is, neither of them was really a true indication of the quality of graphics you'll be seeing on your console. You can argue that they were effectively "mood" pieces, designed to make an impact at a big industry event, but awesome artistic merits aside, the trailers and some of the associated shots were still some way removed from the actual game they are designed to showcase.

Polyphony Digital typically embellish the base gameplay visuals with additional graphical bling for their replay modes (hence the drop from 60FPS to 30FPS in GT5 Prologue), and it's from here that the raw assets are usually derived for their trailer work.

However, what we are seeing in Polyphony's trailers are intricately directed and rendered images where the samples used to create the motion blur are massively increased compared to in-game video, giving an ultra-realistic feeling of movement you won't see in the game. Any visual deficiencies that may be seen in actual gameplay (such as "jumps" in LODs as objects move closer to the viewer) are effortlessly removed. By rendering the video internally at an impossibly high resolution, the maximum LOD models are automatically invoked, high frequency shimmering on texture detail is smoothed away and of course, and any artifacts linked to alpha textures, specular shine and of course "teh jaggies" are disposed of as a matter of course.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-media-manipulation-article