Those lovely comics, and those lovely origins--how to extract them??

[Alpheon]

Hello. I'm new to this community, but not to Freedom Force. This seemed like the place to come to, however, with my question. I've been working non-stop on extracting the beautiful art from Freedom Force and its sequel for the past week or so (ok, so not non-stop). I would really like to have a full collection of the art, and the origin movies.

Now, I understand the art (backgrounds and comics) are stored in simple TGA files within the art.ff resource pack. I got that far. I've been converting them to PNG and piecing together the full backgrounds. It's the comics I'm having trouble with.

When I resize the pieces of each comic cover, and resample them (I use the GIMP and/or Irfanview--love that freeware), they come out blurry. Not horribly so, but based on these images, they can be extracted sharply. The only problem with the Gamebanshee ones is that they're JPEG, and have cut the alpha channel border off. I'd like my images lossless (it is art after all), and I'd like the alpha channel as well.

So what's the best way to extract and piece together the 256x256 TGAs from Freedom Force? I'd REALLY appreciate help. Thanks.

My other question is this: I'd also love to have the origin movies for viewing outside of the game and I bought Fraps just for this purpose, as I found out that the "movies" aren't video at all--but of course, they are actual TGA textures moving in real-time, synced to and audio track. That's either ingenious or incredibly stupid, I don't know. So, anyway, I was simply planning on Frapsing all of them as they play through, but that's a HUGE hassle because my computer is less than state-of-the-art. So, is there a better way to extract/record the comic-panel cutscenes?

I figured one of you would know. Once again, thanks for the help, and I apologize profusely if my above questions sounded incredibly n00bish.

[Gremlin]

Bump, since it would be kinda neat to play the origins alone.

[Lunarman]

As you said, for some unfathomable reason the movies are made using moving meshes with textures on them. So yes, the best way to save them is to fraps them at a high resolution.