http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it8nzI0dAGE&feature=relatedBarry

Cameras, including still frame and video, pick up light completely different than the human eye and are only as accurate as the professional who shoots the footage and the post production they may use for final filtering and then presentation. very rarely does a photo or a video capture the exact visual in perfection to what was seen.

Nevertheless - there is a significant difference in these films - so called "real" versus FSx. In comparison, the FSx film looks quite flat.Barry

The differences between the 2 footages aren't bloom nor camera. There's more complex lighting responsible.FSX does look flat. Reason #1: Cloud lighting is completely unrealistic and no FEX or REX can ever change this. To be honest, I find clouds in FSX very ugly. Barry, what you noticed correctly is how the clouds look brighter in the real footage. In fact they have real contrast, the FSX ones are flat pictures. The structure on brightness of clouds is highly dependent on sun angle. The light scatters within the cloud and highlights some areas and darkens others. This is most dramatic when the sun is low. If you observe bright and dark areas in clouds FSX doesn't come close to what the real world does. The problem is that when the sun is high clouds look different yet again. To get this right you need to simulate real light scattering something ACES haven't bothered with so far. It's a real shame, because I've seen some research work done on this years ago and the results just look amazing. FSX is years behind modern technology, watching the latest FarCry 2 trailer makes me sad.Reason #2: Ground lighting is also unrealistic and flat in FSX. In reality, shadows are a lot darker and pronounced (again depending on the sun). That's one reason why photoreal looks good, it has more dramatic shadows just like in real life.No bloom will fix any of these, and it doesn't have anything to do with cameras either. FSX has a very poor light model...Hope that helps,Christian

Part of the problem is you can't capture the contrast range the eye can, so light and shadow has to be equalized otherwise you lose definition on one side or the other. Photo's and video are exposed so that your brights are washed out or the shadows are to black, which is unavoidable. Games are designed to reduce the contrast range so you have definition in both the light and shadow areas, which gives the flatter contrast range. Adaptive HDR technology is helpful but not perfect.

If you use dx10 preview and bloom the clouds are way better. Much brighter - not nearly as dull as when in dx9.

We had this discussion a thousand times it seems back when I worked on NBA Live at EA. The producers would always complain that the art didn't look as 'contrasty' or 'intense' as a basketball game should on TV or in photographs, or in real life. We artists always tried to explain to them that it can't, and if you try to blow it out with 'bloom' you simply lose highlight definition for the sake of brightness. Fact is your eye can take in a scene with a contrast range *far* beyond that of any camera simply because your iris can contract and expand so quickly depending on your point of focus. The visual cortex averages all the samples your eyes take and produces a somewhat normalized scene for your brain. Until monitors are capable of producing enough lumens to blind a user like the sun can then this problem will always exist to some degree.And I'm kind of glad in a way that monitors aren't capable of this. ;)Cheers,-mike

That is a really cool video! It looks pretty similar to me. In the FS11 "wish list" topic, I said I wished they would pay more attention to the artistry of it all. Seems everyone always is consumed with the technology & programming elements. But nature is not that way, not only in the visuals, but with the way an airplane flys through the air. Not at all and exact science. It is my hope that ACES will spend a good deal looking at real vs fs11 visuals and flight dynamics.

Maybe, maybe not, but look how jittery FSX is. I know FRAPS contributes to part of that but for me, that video says it all.http://www.my-buddy-icon.com/Icons/objects/red_3d_plane.gifAlex ChristoffN562ZBaltimore, MD

>Maybe, maybe not, but look how jittery FSX is. I know FRAPS>contributes to part of that but for me, that video says it>all.>>http://www.my-buddy-icon.com/Icons/objects/red_3d_plane.gif>>Alex Christoff>N562Z>Baltimore, MDYou ever here the saying, don't judge a book by it's cover? You can't judge FSX by this video. One look at the date on the video, it pre-dates FSX SP1, It was one of the original videos of FSX when it was first released. Also, we don't know the performance of the system used in it. It may have just been a Pentium for all we know. If you want to get a better idea of FSX performance on a decent system, you can look at some of my videos below. I also have a TNCM video, so you can compare to this one! That one, and all the non widescreen videos, were run on my old system (R.I.P.) which was a E6700 CTD with 2GB mem, and X1950XTX Crossfires. The widescreen videos are with my current system.