Does anyone know what is going on with pre-rendered video exhibiting severe audio compression artifacts?
I believe every UE5 game I’ve played in the past few years has shown this problem.
Listen to this clip from Tempest Rising which just released:
Its most noticeable near the beginning and end of the clip, but its constant throughout all the pre-rendered cutscenes. Mechwarrior was just as bad if not worse which really sucked because so much of that story was told through bink files. Even Abiotic Factor’s short startup video is horribly compressed.
Is it something related to the default output settings for these video files and most devs just dont listen that closely to what they’re putting out there?
I just realized I’ve been playing South of Midnight and it does NOT have this issue with .bk2 playback, perfectly clean audio, so it can be worked around!
I’ve noticed this too in a few recent titles. It’s likely due to overly aggressive audio compression settings when exporting the video files, especially if they’re using Bink or similar formats. A lot of devs prioritize smaller file sizes for faster loading or distribution, and the audio bitrate ends up getting cut too low. It could also be a result of downmixing or bad codec settings during the render process. Surprised it’s still so common, honestly, even a modest bump in audio bitrate would make a big difference.
i can’t hear the compression artifacts, and i have very sensitive ears. but then i haven’t listened with much attention.
the video itself has low quality. i do notice the low quality on the video.
it’s quite possible that the devs did not used a good compression method.
maybe 1 pass, and maybe by bitrate.
maybe they have a target filesize and had to cut from somewhere.
or maybe it’s because they might have recompressed something already compressed.
as a dev you want your assets to have the biggest quality, but at the same time you’re always worried that players will have enough space on disk, and most people don’t like waiting to download stuff. so devs tend to compress whenever they can.
they might have not realized they went too far.
i’ve worked with videos enough to say that ue can play 4k (and even 8k) at at least 30fps. with much more quality than that (on video and audio). but then you need more space. and hardware decoding, so your choices of codecs, profiles, and settings are limited.