Full-motion video

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Full-motion video (FMV) is a

interactive movies
.

The early 1980s saw almost exclusive use of the

Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT (1995). The introduction of CD-based consoles like 3DOCD-i, and Sega CD brought the concept of interactive FMV gameplay. Companies such as Digital Pictures and American Laser Games
 were formed to produce full-motion video games.

As the

IV, setting the stage for a more expansive tie-up between the movie and video game industries. With the continual improvement of in-game CGI
, FMV as a major gameplay component had eventually disappeared because of the limited gameplay options it allowed.

Arcades

The first wave of FMV games originated in

were entirely original.

The use of

Williams Electronics at the AMOA show in October.[5]

The limited nature of FMV, high price to play (50 cents in an era where 25 cents was standard), high cost of the hardware and problems with reliability quickly took its toll on the buzz surrounding these games and their popularity diminished.

Universal
, stopped development on games after only one release despite announcing several titles.

After only a few years, the technology had improved and Laserdisc players were more reliable. In addition, costs had come down and the average price to play a game had gone up. These factors caused a resurgence of the popularity of Laserdiscs games in the arcade. American Laser Games released a light gun shooting game called Mad Dog McCree in 1990 and it was an instant hit[7] and then in 1991 with Who Shot Johnny Rock? American Laser alone would go on to lease almost a dozen Laserdisc games over the next few years and many other companies again rushed to release titles using the technology. Dragon's Lair II, a title which had been shelved years earlier, was released by Leland to strong sales. Time Traveler further pushed the technology by using special projection technology to give the appearance of 3D visuals.

Again, the fad passed quickly. The limited nature of the Laserdisc hampered interactivity and limited replayability, a key weakness in arcade games. American Laser, the chief producer of Laserdisc games during this era, had stopped making arcade games in 1994 and most other companies switched over to newer technologies around the same time. With the rise of

DVD-ROMs
that caused the largest jump in FMV use in the arcade. Their very large capacities and mature, reliable technology allowed for much cheaper hardware than traditional hardware systems, and FMV cut-scenes became commonplace. FMV as a major gameplay component had disappeared by this time because of the limited gameplay options it allowed.

Home systems

In 1984, a home console system called the

LaserActive from Pioneer
would try the technology again in 1994, but it too failed.

By the early 1990s when

well-known failures in video gaming. At this time, consoles like 3DO, CD-i, and Sega CD borrowed this concept for several low-quality interactive games. Companies such as Digital Pictures and American Laser Games
were formed to produce full-motion video games.

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-to-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. Some games like the Tex Murphy series combined FMV cutscenes with a virtual world to explore.

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.

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.

FMVs in games today typically consist of high-quality pre-rendered video sequences (CGI). These sequences are created in similar ways as computer generated effects in movies. Use of FMV as a selling point or focus has diminished in modern times. This is primarily due to graphical advancements in modern video game systems making it possible for in-game cinematics to have just as impressive visual quality. Digitized video footage of real actors in games generally ended for mainstream games in the early 2000s with a few exceptions such as Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War released in 2006, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars released in 2007, Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure released in 2014, Her Story released in 2015, the 2015 reboot of Need for Speed, and Obduction released in 2016.

Formats

The early 1980s saw the almost exclusive use of the Laserdisc for FMV games. Many arcade games used the technology but it was ultimately considered a fad and fell out of use. At least one arcade game, NFL Football from Bally/Midway, used CEDs to play its video. Some 1970s era Nintendo games used film and projectors. formats had the advantage of offering full frame video and sound without the quality problems of compressed video that would plague later formats like CDs.

With the re-popularization of FMV games in the early 1990s following the advent of CD-ROM, higher-end developers usually created their own custom FMV formats to suit their needs. Early FMV titles used game-specific proprietary video renderers optimized for the content of the video (e.g.,

Pentium CPUs arrived. Consoles, on the other hand, either used a third-party codec (e.g., Cinepak for Sega CD games) or used their own proprietary format (e.g. the Philips CD-i). Video quality steadily increased as CPUs became more powerful to support higher quality video compression and decompression. The 7th Guest, one of the first megahit multiple-CD-ROM games, was one of the first games to feature transparent quality 640x320 FMV at 15 frames per second in a custom format designed by programmer Graeme Devine
.

Other examples of this would be

VQA format, used in most Westwood games made from the mid-1990s up until 2000s Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Firestorm. These video formats initially 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.

Hollywood studio. Sony Imagesoft spent over $3 million on the title.[11] Instead of piecing together the title with filmed assets from their movie (directed by Robert Longo) of the same name, Sony hired Propaganda Code director Douglas Gayeton to write and film an entirely new storyline for the property. The CD-ROM's interactivity was made possible with the Cine-Active engine, based on the QuickTime
2.0 codec.

DVD-ROM release saw MPEG-2
DVD-quality movies that far exceeded 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. Wing Commander IV was also the first game to have used actual film (rather than video tape) to record the FMV scenes which attributed to the ability to create a DVD-quality transfer.

An exception to the rule was The 11th Hour, the sequel to The 7th Guest. 11th Hour featured 640×480 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-color FMV format Smacker. Developers took to the format, and the format ended up being used in over 3,000, largely PC-based games.[12]

With the launch of consoles with built-in optical storage (the

Duck Corporation. While Duck's offering won praise for its quality (showcased in games like Enemy Zero, major Launch titles in the US and the Saturn adaptations of console hits from the Sega AM2
arcade group) the opaque licensing and royalty structure impeded widespread adoption outside of Japanese and larger US developers.

Duck's

TrueMotion technology was extended to the PC and Macintosh as well, showcased in the high-profile Star Trek: Borg and Star Trek: Klingon, The X-Files Game, Final Fantasy VII, and the highly anticipated sequel to Phantasmagoria, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh and other titles. It was reported that versions for PlayStation and GameCube were developed, but the last console version released was for Sega's short-lived Dreamcast
.

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 color games, RAD introduced a new true-color format,

Bink video. Developers quickly took to the format because of its high compression ratios and videogame-tailored features. The format is still one of the most popular FMV formats used in games today. 4,000 games have used Bink, and the number is still growing.[13]

In the late '90s, Duck largely shelved its support for the console market (likely fueled by the direct support for DVD support in newer generation consoles) and focused its formats instead on internet delivered video. Duck went public as

Xiph
Project.

Windows Media Video, DivX, Flash Video, Theora and WebM are also now major players in the market. DivX is used in several GameCube games, including Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike.

See also

References

  1. ^ "立体CGを駆使したVDゲーム 〜 未来の宇宙戦争 〜 フナイから 『インターステラー』" [VD Game That Makes Full Use of 3D CG – Future Space War: "Interstellar" from Funai] (PDF). Game Machine (in Japanese). No. 226. Amusement Press, Inc. 15 December 1983. p. 24.
  2. ^ "Looks at Lasers: The Shape of Games to Come". Computer and Video Games. No. 26 (December 1983). 16 November 1983. pp. 86–7. Retrieved 2018-01-05.
  3. ^ "Overseas Readers Column: 21st AM Show Of Tokyo Held Heralding The Age Of The Video Disk" (PDF). Game Machine (in Japanese). No. 223. Amusement Press, Inc. 1 November 1983. p. 34.
  4. ^ Gorzelany, Jim (April 1984). "Going Full Cycle". Video Games. Vol. 2, no. 7. pp. 24–29.
  5. Cash Box
    . November 12, 1983. pp. 30–4.
  6. ^ Javy Gwaltney (August 4, 2018). "When FMV Ruled The World And Why It's Coming Back". Game Informer.
  7. ^ Colin Campbell (October 25, 2018). "Before Red Dead Redemption 2, Mad Dog McCree was Western gaming's sheriff in town". Polygon. Vox Media, Inc.
  8. .
  9. .
  10. ^ "Business Week". Business Week (3392–3405). Bloomberg: 58. 1994. Retrieved January 25, 2012. Hollywood's aim, of course, is to tap into the $7 billion that Americans pour into arcade games each year — and the $6 billion they spend on home versions for Nintendo and Sega game machines. Combined, it's a market nearly 2 ½ times the size of the $5 billion movie box office.
  11. ^ Gillen, Marilyn A. (February 18, 1995). "Film Developments: Studios Expand Into Multimedia, And Game Companies Draw On Hollywood Talent, To Meet Consumers' Great Expectations". Billboard. p. 69.
  12. ^ "Smacker video Technology". RAD Game Tools. Retrieved 4 May 2013.
  13. .

External links