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Created by
The Warleader ProductionsUploaded by
Godfiend3Virus scan
About this mod
Life Is Strange: Remastered Cutscenes is a mod that takes the pre-rendered cutscenes of the game that released at launch, and upscales them to 4K60fps.This brings the quality of the cutscenes to be of the same caliber as the in game footage.
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs

Looking for upscaled content for Life Is Strange: Before The Storm? Check out the sister mod here:
Before The Storm: Remastered Cutscenes Mod
Introduction:
Welcome to the official release of the Life Is Strange: Remastered Cutscenes mod!! The purpose of this mod is to bring you all of the pre-rendered cutscenes in the game to 4K60fps. The original release of the remastered collection hosted many great improvements, however the pre-rendered cutscenes were a major downgrade. The game was plagued with low-quality cutscenes that looked like they were at 240p resolution. Technically they are rendered at 1080p, but a technicality doesn't matter to much when the cutscenes look like crap. This mod aims to fix that.
Goal:
The goal of the mod is to improve the pre-rendered cutscenes to be MUCH higher quality than the original release. While the original game had pre-rendered cutscenes, they were practically indistinguishable from the actual gameplay. I didn't even know the original game had pre-rendered cutscenes until earlier this year, and I played the original game at launch. That being my point, the cutscenes and the in game footage blended together seamlessly.
That is most definitely not the case with the remastered collection.
All the cutscenes looked like they were recorded in 240p, even though the files said they were in 1080p. This made no sense to me, and upon research, I found some forums discussing this and noticing how it looked like the loading screen was based off the mobile port of this game. This led to strong evidence that the pre-rendered cutscenes were also based off the mobile port, resulting in the low quality cutscenes.
So my plan was to upscale all the cutscenes to be of higher quality. The resolution is higher and the framerate is smoother, so now everyone should be much happier and be able to play the game as a proper remaster of the original game.
Improvements:
The mod uses a program called "Topaz Video Enhance A.I." to upscale all the footage of the game to a much higher visual quality. When using this program, I had to do 4 separate renders of the program, 3 of them in Topaz and one of them in my video editing software. This is what the process was to improve the game:
- Upscale the resolution to 4K
- Use a denoise algorithm to remove any video noise the first upscaling didn't remove, along with (at the same time) enhancing the details of the cutscene and smoothing out any oddities that might appear (blurry lines, jagged edges, etc.)
- Upscaling the framerate to 60fps. Some programs can be risky at doing this, but Topaz definitely has one of the best framerate upscaling algorithms I've seen, as I've viewed every cutscene a few times now and they all look smooth.
- A re-render of each cutscene to match the audio, as upscaling the footage caused the audio and video to be out of sync. Thus I took careful time to align them correctly.
All this effort has resulted in cutscenes that match the in game footage much more closely and look a hell of lot better than launch quality. You also won't die inside when you go from 60fps or more to 30fps out of the blue when a cutscene boots up.
Installation:
Update (7/6/2023): It's come to my attention at the time of writing this, that as per the most recent update to the game, additional movie files have been added to the game. These updated files do not affect my mod in the slightest. These updates are Japanese files and for some reason, the Nintendo Switch version of the Japanese files too (Haven't the faintest idea why the Nintendo Switch cutscenes are included in the pc release but who fucking knows at this point). I don't even see an option to change to japanese dialogue in the game settings so I'm not sure what the point of including those files was. Regardless, you can just ignore those files and still follow the install instructions below, as my files affect the original english cutscenes!
Download each episode and unzip the file. I recommend 7zip. I'll provide a link here if you don't have it: 7-Zip
I've also included the loading screen as an optional download, along with two text documents that describe how to fix additional issues.
One related to cutscenes not playing in episodes (mainly episode 5, but it has happened once or twice in other episodes) and another related to an audio bug where the footsteps of Max can only be heard on the left side of your headphones. These are extra things that aren't upscaled cutscenes, so if you would like to download them as well, they are there for you! I encourage you to at least download the "episode audio not playing" cutscene fix document, as it's the best fix I can find so far and should help you if you run into the same issue when playing the game.
Once you have downloaded everything, go to the following file path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\LIS - Remastered\LIS\Content\Movies
(Do note, your file path may be different if you have your game installed on a different drive. Find the drive where you have your game installed and then follow the file path the rest of the way).
Then, once you are at the movies folder, you'll see folders labeled as each episode (i.e. Episode01) go into the folder of each episode and remove the cutscenes. This includes the files with "_JP" & "_Switch_JP" appended to the end of them. These are japanese VA files and considering most everyone plays this game with english dialogue, we will not be needing them.
I would encourage you to back them up to a separate folder in case something goes wrong, but it's up to you. I haven't had any errors removing them so you should be ok to delete them if you wish. Up to you.
After removing the cutscenes for the episode, go to the folders of my mod for the same episode, copy the contents of the folder, and paste it into the folder for the game directory. Don't just paste the entire folder, as I named my folders slightly differently. Just copy the contents inside the folders of my mod, and paste them into the folders of the game.
(For the loading screen, paste it inside the folder called "Movies". There's a movies folder inside the movies folder. Good folder management deck nine!)
Once you do that for each episode, you should be all done! And then you can go back to LIS and play the game as intended ^^
Compatibility:
This mod is not compatible with: Life is Strange Remastered - Russian Dubbing Mod.
Don't get me wrong, that mod is absolutely excellent! The team did a great job redubbing the game in Russian voice acting! However, it replaces the pre-rendered cutscenes of the game, which is exactly what my mod changes, so they are not compatible.
Every other mod for the game should be compatible, as the Russian dubbing mod and this mod are the only two to modify the pre-rendered cutscenes.
Sharing:
You absolutely, under any circumstance, are NOT allowed to upload my mod to another site. I chose nexus because it's been a fantastic site to get mods from for years and it seems to be staying that way. If you see my mod on another site, it's not mine and I don't recommend downloading it! If I update this mod, there's a chance that version won't have the most up to date version and it could contain malware/viruses. So please just stick with the mod on this page :D
Final:
Thank you all so much for checking out this mod and downloading it! It was a ton of effort to get all these cutscenes upscaled and then correctly lined up with the audio. The original Life Is Strange is a gem, and it didn't deserve to have such low quality cutscenes in the remaster. The game is still riddled with bugs, which is why I provided a couple text documents to hopefully help fix any other prevalent issues that hinder the games enjoyment beyond just the cutscenes. I quite like the new character designs and the lighting system, but the cutscenes and bugs were a mess. While I can't go into the game code and modify it, I hope these upscales and the couple text documents I provide can give general solutions to these bugs.
Thank you all again for downloading my mod! I hope you can consider endorsing and sharing the mod so that the life is strange community can get a chance to better enjoy the game. I hope you all have a wonderful day!