Full Motion Video - Definition and Overview

Full motion video, usually abbreviated as FMV, is a popular term for television-quality film or animation in a video game. The first use of FMV began in the early 1990s when personal computers and consoles became technically capable of utilizing more than a few minutes' worth of movies in a game. Within a few years, FMV cutscenes became a nearly mandatory component in computer games, and even as a better-quality replacement for sprites in FMV games. Popular platforms for FMV include QuickTime, MPEG and Smacker.

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 cut-scenes has reduced drastically as similar quality graphics can be produced in the game engine with much less disc space required for the source data. Good examples of this are the Half Life games which also left the player in control during cut scenes, reducing the feeling of losing control.

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