Full motion video

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.