(First time posting, so not sure if I did anything wrong.)
I read the definition, but I really can’t wrap my head around what it actually means.
In: Other
When used in video games, it refers to a technique where you use pre-recorded video instead of in-game video to play a pre-scripted section of narrative.
Let’s say you’re playing a game like Grand Theft Auto, where you control a character. At some point, that character talks to other characters in a non-controlled, linear cutscene, right? A designer can do that cutscene one of two ways. In the first way, the designer uses the same graphics program that’s used to draw your character on the screen – the designer just tells the program what to do explicitly instead of letting you choose. In the second way, the designer records the video outside of the video game entirely, with a different method, and just plays it back. This second way is “full motion video”.
Back in the day we used to have this as a new thing. It contained not only great graphics, but full motion video sequences! It was considered (arguably) another layer of immersion with limitied tech at the time. Eventually this went out of date and are now considered cinematics, or cut scenes in games. FMV was also in tons of CD Dictionaries (among other things) in the early 90’s, and this was insane, like a moving picture in a book at the time.
FMV is when an actual camera’s recording is used in a video game. Games like Her Story or the X-Files game used actual footage of humans, and that’s what you see in the game.
If you’re not using FMV, you’re using graphics of some kind. It can be minimalist or extremely realistic, motion capture or literal blocks on a screen, but at it’s core it’s using the graphics code of the game as opposed to literal video.
Cutscenes in any given blockbuster title? Computer-generated graphics. Same with most anything you see in a video game. FMV is by and large an exception and a rarity.
If the question is why “full motion”, that means it’s at least as good as the video you’d see on your TV–e.g. full screen, 25 or 30 frames per second depending on location. This is to contrast with “partial motion video”, which would only occupy part of the screen and/or be at a lower frame rate, because that’s all that older machines could handle back in the 90s.
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