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NWNEE Overkill Cinematics Overrides

Please Read This.


This is an "HD", or at least 1080p 60 Frames Per Second (FPS) friendly override for the original campaign cinematics, and the cinematics for the Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark campaigns. The intention here is to make them suitable for the majority of game players, who as of 2020, are mostly using 1920x1080 monitors with 60 hz refresh rates.

This package would be beneficial for any players, especially those using resolutions higher than 800x600, though since the resolutions of the files are 1080p max, there will not be an increase in quality between watching these movies on a 4k monitor (the size of 4 1080p monitors), when compared to a 1080p monitor.


The original Bioware releases were, for the most part, 800x600 RadTools .bik video files, with the campaign cinematics at 15 fps, while the NWN introductory movie (Nasher fighting Minotaur) amd a few miscellaneous movies were rendered at 30 fps. Some of these materials were also 29.97 fps and 14.98 fps as well. All of these movies have been artificially increased to 60 FPS to match 60hz.

The release of EE included .wbm versions of Bioware's .bik movies, but these movies were re-formatted for NWN:EE. It would seem they were accidentally rescaled from 800x600 to 660x600 (narrower). Additionally, the movie code for playing movies shrunk them an additonal 10%, resmapling the movies from 660x600 to 594x540, centered. This end size was able to be increased, with the UI upscale feature, for players with higher resolutions.

Perhaps this was done to make room for 1080p monitors using UI upscale 2.0, since the doubling of window sizes caused the display to behave like a 960x540 monitor, which is slightly shorter than Bioware's original minimum resolution of 800x600. However, the main impact of these two resizes was a distortion of the text and image clarity.

In the 8193.13 patch, movie playback was adjusted to allow larger than 800x600 files, higher than 30 FPS, and also automatically resizes movies to fit the smaller of the two window dimensions, while preserving the movie's aspect ratio. This also allowed the movies to be "shrunk" to fit the scale of 1080p monitors using UI upscale 2.0, removing the need for videos to be shrunk by 10%.

Since these movies are HD (at most 1080 pixels tall and at most 1920 pixels wide) and 60 FPS, they will not work on game versions earlier than 8193.13, the game will skip them as if they were missing.

8193.14, currently a development build available to Steam players through the Betas menu, allows the User Directory Movies folder to override the Install Directory Mov folder, when files have the same name.

Since these movies are installed to the /movies folder via Steam Workshop, they will not work on game version 8193.13, unless the specific /mov files this package is designed to replace are manually deleted by a subscriber, or these Steam Workshop files are placed in the /mov folder in the Install Directory, replacing the originals.


While my restoration of the original .bik files would allow the text to finally be easily read in a package such as this, especially with the increased resolutions based on those restorations, I have decided to remove the text at the bottom of the movies anyways, to allow them to better fit today's 16:9 aspect ratio. Movies that must remain in 4:3, such as the intro Nasher movie, and the credits, have not been similarly cropped, and instead increased from 800x600 to 1440x1080.

These movies are only available in English. If there is high enough demand, I am open to the idea of swapping the audio tracks with the audio tracks of Bioware's translated versions. I believe only German, French, and Polish have their movies overdubbed (in addition to the subtitles, which I've removed in English anyways).

Since the campaign letterbox movies have been stripped of the black bars in the video (with monitors narrower than 32:13, or 16:6.5, re-adding them to preserve aspect ratio), including the text, I am open to making the videos wider than 1920, for players with very wide monitors. This would allow a player with a 1080 height monitor with anything wider than 1920 up to 2658 pixels wide, to have a higher resolution, and players with wider than 2658 would begin to have black bars on the sides instead. Even the "ultrawide" resolution of 2560x1080 is too short, however, (causing the file resolution to shrink to fit), so this might only really be practical on extremely rare 3840x1080 displays, or just as a slightly higher detail version for 4k monitors (3840x2160, at which point, I may as well make them 3840x1560)

Finally, it's important to note that this would have been a colossal effort back in 2002, but, with fairly cheap/free tools and some processing time, a hobbyist like myself has been able to learn about and create this kit in a few dozen hours. The production power of today's computers, and wide selection of software, combined with the wealth of knowledge about just about anything on the internet, should really demonstrate to anyone that 20 year old Neverwinter Nights assets are thoroughly upgradeable even by untrained hobbyists, as long as they have the interest in making the effort.


This is the first installment of my Neverwinter Nights "Overkill" override series, which primarily aims to deliver a huge improvement to stock assets that anyone neither needs, expects, or asked for, to a quality level overshooting what most would consider to be a proper upgrade.

This particular item is for movie files, and although the universal webm format is highly compressed to a very efficient size, that does still make this a large download for a single category override package.

Premium Module cinematics are NOT included.


These are the following tools I used to make the improvements to the videos in this subscription.

Used to convert Bioware's .bik files from the NWN Diamond installation to .mp4
Used to convert finished .mov files from processing into the final .webm format for NWN:EE
Amazing command line OpenCL program used to intelligently add frames between frames.
Unfortunately I did not use the full power of this program, since their morphological frame injection transitioned content even between Bioware's hard and fade cuts.
Additionally, it may produce better results to interpolate frames after the resolution increases, but, I had originally planned to use Topaz, which would need the extra frames to create detail.
Because of the above two caveats, the 3 new frames between every original frame do jiggle during moments with a lot of motion.
I was not able to use this incredible new program much, since this early version is full of bugs, and lacks GPU support for Radeon graphics cards. I only used it on 1 5 second movie (Beamdog Logo), with each frame taking a a full minute, and sixty frames per second, the 5 second video took 5 hours of all 24 threads of my CPU maxed out. If you would like me to use it on more videos, I'm open to the idea of having a high powered Nvidia GPU donated to me.
AE's "detail-preserving Upscale" allowed me to do basic resolution increases and crops from my 60 FPS originals to HD sizes. There is only a moderate increase of "quality" from this transformation, along with some noise removal, but each video only required about 30 minutes of processing.

This workshop item has also been uploaded to the neverwintervault archives at
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/images/movie/nwnee-overkill-cinematics-overrides

Please let me know if you have any questions in either the item discussions tab (found above the screenshots), or in the