Full motion video
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- 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 pre-recorded TV-quality movie or animation in a video game.
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[edit] Origins
The first use of FMV was in 1983 with Dragon's Lair, a laserdisc video game by Cinematronics. Another early instance of FMV was Hasbro's unreleased video game system named NEMO. The NEMO home system created games with VHS tapes rather than 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-based computer games such as Night Trap (1992), The 7th Guest (1992), Voyeur (1993), Phantasmagoria (1995), and Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT (1995). These FMV games frequently used D-list (or worse) movie and TV actors and promised to create the experience of playing an interactive movie. However, production values were quite low with amateurish sets, lighting, costumes, and special effects. In addition, the video quality in these early games was low, and the gameplay frequently did not live up to the hype becoming well-known failures in video gaming. At this time, consoles like 3DO, CD-i, and Sega CD borrowed this concept for a slew of low-quality interactive games.
A part of the interest consumers had in FMV was caused by the rise of the Internet. Also, the "multimedia" phenomenon that was exploding in popularity at the time increased the popularity of FMV because consumers were excited by this new emerging interactive technology. The personal computer was rapidly evolving during the early-mid 1990s from a simple text-based productivity device into a home entertainment machine. Gaming itself was also emerging from its niche market into the mainstream with the release of easier-to-use and more powerful operating systems, such as Microsoft's Windows 95, that leveraged continually evolving processing capabilities.
Video game consoles too saw incredible gains in presentation quality and contributed to the mass market's growth in awareness of gaming. It was during the 1990s that the video/computer game industry first beat Hollywood in earnings. Sony made its debut in the console market with the 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). A part of the machine's hardware was a dedicated M-JPEG processing unit which enabled far superior quality relative to other platforms of the time. The FMVs in Final Fantasy VIII, for example, were marketed as movie-quality at the time.
FMV in games today consists almost completely of extremely high-quality pre-rendered video sequences (CGI). These sequences are created in similar ways as computer generated effects in movies. The use of real actors in games generally ended for mainstream games at the end of the 1990s.
[edit] Definition
FMV differs from real-time cutscenes in that real-time cutscenes render the surrounding environment as it appears 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 much higher quality than real-time cutscenes, and the two can usually be differentiated by this. With computer games running on more modern hardware, however, the use of FMV for cutscenes has been drastically reduced as similar quality graphics can be produced in the game engine with much less disc space required for the source data.
With modern computer hardware, games are rendered at much higher resolutions than typical FMVs, resulting in FMVs being easily spottable as "lower quality" than the game itself. In this case, while a pre-rendered FMV may use more advanced effects than possible in-game, it is considered lower quality due to being seen at a lower resolution. Contrasting examples of this include the Half-Life series, which leaves the player in control during in-game cutscenes, and the Splinter Cell series on PC, which utilizes FMV that is lower resolution than the actual game, yet uses advanced rendering techniques beyond those of a single PC[citation needed].
[edit] Formats
With the popularization of FMV games in the early 1990s with the advent of the CD-ROM, higher-end developers usually created their own custom FMV formats to suit their needs. Early FMV titles frequently used custom-coded-per-game video renderers because the codec selection of the early 1990s was minimal. For example, PC CPUs were incapable of playing back real-time MPEG-1 until the fastest 486 and Pentium CPUs arrived. Consoles like the SegaCD on the other hand opted for commercial codecs like Cinepak to compress video, whilst the Philips CD-i utilized its own proprietary format. Video quality steadily increased as CPUs became more powerful, and as the video compression and decompression evolved. The 7th Guest, one of the first megahit multiple-CD-ROM games, was one of the first games to feature near-lossless quality 640x320 FMV at 15 frames per second in a custom format designed by programmer Graeme Devine.
Other examples of this would be Sierra's VMD (Video and Music Data) format, used in games like Gabriel Knight 2 and Phantasmagoria, or Westwood Studios' VQA format, used in the early Command and Conquer games. These video formats offered very limited video quality, due to the limitations of the machines the games needed to run on. Ghosting and distortion of high-motion scenes, heavy pixelization, and limited color palettes were prominent visual problems. However, each game pushed the technological envelope and was typically seen as impressive even with quality issues. Lower-cost games, often not having the time or budgets to develop their own formats, typically used the then very low resolution AVI and QuickTime formats.
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, for example, was one of the most significant FMV titles made in 1994, featuring big-name Hollywood actors. However, the video quality in the game suffered significantly from the aforementioned problems and at times was almost visually indecipherable. Yet this did not stop the title from earning significant praise for its innovative gameplay/FMV combination. Its sequel, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, used a similar custom movie codec in its CD-ROM release, but a later limited-volume DVD-ROM release saw MPEG-2 DVD-quality movies that entirely eclipsed the original CD release in quality. A hardware decoder card was required at the time to play back the DVD-quality video on a PC.
An exception to the rule was The 11th Hour, the sequel to The 7th Guest. 11th Hour featured 640x480 FMV at 30 frames-per-second on 4 CDs. The development team had worked for three years on developing a format that could handle the video, as the director of the live-action sequences had not shot the FMV sequences in a way that could be easily compressed. However, this proved to be the game's downfall, as most computers of the day could not play the full-resolution video. Users were usually forced to select an option which played the videos at a quarter-size resolution in black-and-white.
As FMV established itself in the market as a growing game technology, a small company called RAD Game Tools appeared on the market with their 256-colour FMV format Smacker. Developers took to the format, and the format ended up being used in over 3,000 games.
As the popularity of games loaded with live-action and FMV faded out in the late 1990s, and with Smacker becoming outdated in the world of 16-bit colour games, RAD introduced a new true-colour format, Bink video. Developers quickly took to the format because of its high compression ratios and optimization for video games. The format is still one of the most popular FMV formats used in games today. 4,000 games use have used Bink, and the number is still growing.
Windows Media Video, DivX, and Theora are also becoming major players in the market. DivX is used in several Nintendo GameCube titles, including Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike.
