@Leo-J - that's not a cutscene.

The posterizing looks pretty obvious in the blue parts.

EDIT - also the macroblocking, you can literally see the squares where a gradient should be present.

SPOILERS:

Notice this so called " pre rendered" cut scene

You can move freely with the mark 2 and bump in to characters and do as you like:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8RC718OxwEo&feature=related

Then why do many of the cutscenes have noticeable compression artifacts?

The fact of the matter is you don't know jack shit. Its also hysterical that you post a video which is clearly in-game. Try the cutscene after that where raiden has to chop off his arm to get out from under a rock, but then somehow stops a massive mile long warship with his other arm.  You can see tons of macroblocking in the sky there.

To be fair Photoshop did a poor job of converting that to jpeg. I should've checked my settings before I saved it.

Still, the artifacts are really obvious in that entire scene, and most any other time when the sky is a different color than everything else. It really makes me wonder what sort of video codec they used on this game.

It probably has more to do with bitrate than the codec itself. Supposedly they were space limited, which makes me wonder why they didn't ditch the damn uncompressed audio for better quality in the videos. I was surprised to hear about the FMVs in the first place, everyone was assuming it was all in-engine.

I dont feel like arguing, MGS4 DOES NOT USE PRE RENDERED cutscenes, that is a FACT.

Well that cutscene in particular couldn't have been done in-engine. It had tons of characters and vehicles on screen, with lots of action to boot. Overall it was a rather impressive scene, but there is no way it could've had a decent frame-rate in real time. There are also some cutscenes that have effects that aren't present in-game.

I'm just surprised that they had to compress video to the point where scenes like this look terrible. I can't imagine the game itself taking up anything more than 12gb. But I guess uncompressed audio in different languages adds up fast.

I mentioned the codec in particular because just about any scene that has a lot of variation in color gets bad macroblocking. Since most of the game is a limited color palette, it isn't too noticeable most of the time. But it make me wonder if they choose a codec that performed well with limited colors - but I'm honestly not to knowledgeable about video compression.

 Dude you know the irony of this?

You believe his bull shit.

Lol, you are right this doesn't look in game...