Bungie said it was a real-time cinematic. Where does that leave us? Simple.. It's real-time cinematic footage of the engine on a pc with high AA.. They never said it was a real-time cinematic on the X360.. The amount of AA is at least 8x, and the X360 can do 4x max. And Bungie never said in-game either, though their cinematics are always rendered in real-time and don't look much different from gameplay.. In any case, they clearly said "real-time cinematic".

But uh.. Don't take my word for it.. I could still be wrong.

I found the video quite good. Remember it's a teaser, the full trailer will come later this month on Xbox Live.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/halo-reach-trailer-analysis-blog-entry

Halo: Reach trailer analysis

December 14th, 2009

Aside from some blurry pre-alpha screenshots and unconfirmed game details, next to nothing has been revealed about Bungie's 2010 epic - Halo: Reach. Until now. Over the weekend, a new video was released, showcasing a massive technological leap over the previous Halo engine.

So, just how "real" is the new trailer? Prior to its unveiling, wording on the content was carefully chosen. The video would be "in-engine", the key phase missing there being "real-time". It's fairly obvious that what we have here is a offline render of a Reach cut-scene: Bungie effectively allowing the engine all the time it needs to create a massively high-resolution version of the cinematic, which is then downscaled to native 720p, eliminating all aliasing and producing a superb-looking presentation.

What we're seeing here is indeed in-game assets running in the new engine, it's just that we have no real idea how this will translate to actual run-time performance. More aliasing is an obvious given, but it's unclear what other tweakables within the engine Bungie ramped up in order to produce the best-looking trailer.

A high-quality, super-streamable, hand-encoded version of the Halo: Reach trailer, presented for your viewing pleasure.View this video in HD

Back at E3 2006, two versions of the Halo 3 trailer made it out in the wild: a full-on super-sampled, 60FPS video, along with a run-time 30FPS rendition that exhibited plenty of aliasing. In that case, Bungie was sampling the code on the showfloor, so we'd be hugely surprised if a corresponding run-time version of this video were released.

What we do see in the trailer offers up plenty of cool discussion points though. Models, geometry and textures certainly look as though they are based on in-game assets, and in-game atmospherics and lighting are phenomenal. Material shaders in terms of the armour, vehicles and human faces are of an outstanding quality.

Indirect lighting (shown about a minute into the trailer) looks of a high quality and it's interesting to note that the shadows are of a high quality too. Coming out of the building, we see some low-resolution shadows, but the effect is decent owing to high-quality filtering. Human characters in terms of artwork and especially animation are hugely improved over the somewhat-average efforts in Halo 3 and ODST. Bungie also has a state-of-the-art motion capture studio in-house now that should help improve animation still further.

Interesting artefacts in the trailer - first up (left), a depth-of-field bug where only the bottom half of the wing in the foreground is processed. In the second shot (right), note the low resolution shadow cast by the door. It still looks fine though owing to a large level of filtering. Aspects like this show this is indeed in-engine as opposed to pre-rendered CG.

Over and above all of this, it is also worth remembering that the cinematics often show the engine running in a "best case" scenario. Certainly, in Halo 3, the cut-scenes often showed a higher graphical quality than the actual gameplay - the scene where the Arbiter stabs the Prophet of Truth showed a dramatic difference in lighting. How or whether this translates to Reach won't be apparent until we get to see proper in-game screenshots, which we don't expect until the beta launches some time in 2010.

With the tech stuff out of the way, does the Reach trailer give us any hints about how the new game fits into the established Halo canon? Obviously the fact that we get to see plenty of Spartan IIs in action is the big news here, but what is curious is that according to the existing mythos, there were only ever 75 of them, hand-picked from 150 children, hence John-117, the iconic Master Chief.

Spotted in the trailer were Jorge-052 (tank guy), Carter-259 (leader guy), Kat-320 (speedrunner with less armour from waist-level down). It'll be interesting to learn whether Bungie is adjusting the canon by introducing a new batch of Spartans we don't know about, or whether we are seeing the Spartan-IIIs here - cut-down, cannon-fodder troops lacking the refined genetics of the Spartan-IIs. As promised by Bungie, we also see the return of the ODSTs: the anonymous male's helmet was of the same design.

With the Halo Waypoint now established and a clear effort being made to build and reference an established timeline of events, it'll be intriguing to see how this plays out as more details on Halo: Reach emerge.

Awesome post Jagged!

Nice find, Jagged. Quite a good read.

nice

Okay, first off, it's definitely in-game and real time, because there is still some aliasing.

Onto view distances. It seems the Reach engine is a lot better, because Bungie is making much better use of 'real' geometry mixed with skyboxed mixed with matte to keep performance up.

The white line is where the 'real' geometry ends and where you start seeing lower-detail skybox. the cyan line is where you stop seeing skybox and start seeing a matte painting.

This a big improvement over Halo 3. Halo 3's super wide shots like this were 99% matte-only. Most cutscenes were real-geometry closeups or just a skybox to keep performance up. Not anything wrong with that, mind, but it's obvious how much better the Reach engine is. The cutscenes in this game should be spectacular.

If you still don't know what i'm talking about, this is what the scene would look like from the side if i'm correct:

It looks like they've got a new lighting and shadowing strategy compared to halo 2 and 3. Looks like everything casts a shadow, no matter how far above the ground it's sitting:

Also the shadows on everything combine correctly, something not even the source engine is doing on PC (I believe, I haven't looked at episode 1 or 2 yet, so I may be wrong, and apologize if so). They're also very edge-blurred so they look very nice. Also this shot makes the slight film grain effect they're putting on everything more obvious. The film grain is 'smoothing' out the image thanks to how our eyes work and does not allow any harsh edges to grab our eye's attention.

very nice use of depth focus to keep aliasing from showing up on the near arm. But this shot is the most obvious answer to "how is Bungie pulling off that much AA on 360?". Well, the answer is, they're not. They are however exploiting the human eye and using a new technique. Look at the edges of the arm:

Yep, they're use a new technique where the edges are blurred into the surrounding area. This assists the 360's hardware AA and creates smoother edges. This technique has a name but I'm forgetting it now. It's similiar to what Nintendo used in Mario Galaxy to make poly edges seem super smooth. Now it's being used on the 360.

Another shot showing the technique. When you watch in HD, it's really obvious:

So, final verdict: Bungie played it a lot safer this time around in regards to engine features, believe it or not. There is no real time helmet reflections. What we saw in this trailer? Yeah, the final game is gonna look that good. Halo 3 actually looked better than the E32006 trailer (minus the realtime visor reflection, which had to be dropped). Everything you saw in this trailer is possible on the 360, due to clever technical tricks and exploitation of how the human eye works.

The graphics for Reach can only go up from here.

Of course, all we care about is the gameplay, right?

Right? 

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Found that on a website I frequent. Kind of sad that this guy can explain the high AA but "professionals" like Digital Foundry can't.

waw bungie employees gota phd in human anatomy with specail courses to the eye. lol just joking but this shows just a how talented bungie are.

the idea of six spartans fighting is crazy. please put william i liked him the most but he had joshua with him and here they have different spartans. william actually killed a hunter in hand to han combat and when he did all the covenant were to scared to attack him and the other hunter brother killed william by the fuel rod gun he had which would be cheating but a spartan killing a hunter in hand to hand combat i mean look at the hunter it can be hit by a tank and survive that is just crazy the only other spartan to kill a hunter in hand to hand combat was john 117.
I think bungie will give each spartan certain traits like the girl with super spead since she is the fastest spartan with speeds up to 40 miles per hour she had to slow down for the other spartans to catch her.
please bungie ke each spartan unique.
i think one of the spartan is a demolishin expert so he should havea rocket launh and all types of greandes with twice the damage of another spartan
that would definetly be a very nice idea for halo reach making each spartan unique.

Edit: my hype meter is going crazy with only a 2 30 min fo showing some spartans so how hyped i will be when they actaully shows soem gameplay or release halo reach beta is crazy. I am buying the legendry or mythic edition of halo reach. this is probably the last halo of this generation.

What? You did put a hat on Halo : Reach trailer? How is that possible? You are for certain the only one to make such a deed.