Full motion video

Categories: Animation | Computer game design

This article is about FMV general concept. For the FMV used in gameplay, see FMV game.

Full motion video, usually abbreviated as FMV, is a popular term for TV-quality movie or animation in a video game. The first use of FMV was in 1985 with Hasbro's unreleased video game system named NEMO. The NEMO home system created games with VHS tapes rather then ROM cartridges or 3.5 disks. In the early 1990s when PCs and consoles moved to creating games on a CD, they became technically capable of utilizing more than a few minutes' worth of movies in a game. This gave rise to a slew of FMV and computer games such as Night Trap (1992), Dracula Unleashed (1993), and Voyeur (1994). These FMV games used B-minus movie and TV actors and promised to be create the experience of playing an interactive movie. However, the FMV quality in these early games was low, and the game play did not live up to the hype, becoming well-known failures in video gaming. Nonetheless, two major things kept up the interest in FMV.

The first thing was that rise of the Internet increased the popularity of FMV as consumers wanted to download various music and video files online. As the technology improved, so did the FMV quality. Popular platforms for FMV include QuickTime, MPEG and Smacker.

The second thing was the rise of Sony as a major player in the video game industry with their release of the 32-bit PlayStation. The PlayStation was probably the first console to popularize FMVs (as opposed to earlier usage of FMV which was seen as a passing fad). The FMVs in Final Fantasy VIII, for example, are considered movie-quality. FMVs are still being used, mostly by the PlayStation 2. Square Enix (creators of Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Kingdom Hearts) has a tradition of designing games with an abundance of FMVs.

FMV differs from real-time cutscenes in that real-time cutscenes must render the game environment just as in the actual game, whereas FMV is simply a playback of something that was previously recorded, usually rendered by a much more powerful machine. Thus, FMV was traditionally usually much higher quality than real-time cutscenes, and the two can usually be differentiated by this.

With games running on more modern hardware, the use of FMV for cutscenes has reduced drastically as similar quality graphics can be produced in the game engine with much less disc space required for the source data. A good example of this is the Half-Life series which also left the player in control during cutscenes, reducing the feeling of losing control.

Using the game engine also allows the cutscenes to be played at much higher resolution (assuming sufficient processing power in the computer), so now FMVs can usually be spotted because they're lower quality than the in game graphics.

A great place to watch FMV work and computer gaming cinematics is the ground breaking onedotzero festival. It was one of the first to show FMVs with its ground breaking lens flare programme on the big screen and re contextualise this moving image as art. See www.onedotzero.com for more details.de:Full Motion Video pl:Full Motion Video