We have 3 types of cut-scenes in the game
1) Offline rendered FMV. Something in these scenes would cost too much (i.e. take too much development time) to develop on PS3 for a one shot effort. Think some fancy effects, eyeball reflections etc.
2) Rendered in-game real-time but captured and played back as an FMV.
We do this sometimes, for the simply reason it helps hide load times. So while we show you a cutscene, we can be loading the level your about to play in the background, instead of actually increasing the load time while we brought in the cutscene data (which itself can be huge, due to resolution of the animation and texture data for the close ups) also means of course there more memory for the actual game bits.
3) Rendered in-game.
As the only reason we do two is for memory/loading reasons, at other times we have the resources available so we just render them real-time.
BTW the choice between type 2 and 3 is a nice advantage of Bluray. Its a non obvious optimisation a big ol' disk lets you make. Were really tight on disk space at the moment mind, so in a few places we had to go with type 3 cos we didnt' have any more disk space for more HD movies.
