Why videos are always smoother

Well, not sure if you have noticed it, but generally games in trailers and videos sometimes seem to be running a lot smoother.
For instance, look at this Back to Dinosaur Island video:

Or many other examples out there. When the camera moves around or dinos move around, it’s like 2x smoother than when I’m playing something on my own PC or working in game engine. (Even though we don’t have a fps problem).

What do you think?

maybe having good FPS is part of your problem, you might want to check out the thread Tim Hobson posted a while ago, its got some good info in it and could clear things up a bit:)

Sadly, it’s not uncommon for developers to pre-render videos with in-game models/lighting/etc., in order to make a smooth trailer.

Either that, or they are running on the best hardware they can, such as Titan Xs in SLI on the latest Intel processors, and running the game on super-optimized settings and making sure that nothing else is running in the background. In which case, they probably had a device to record the video directly from a monitor and recorded it to a different storage medium from the computer.

It’s probably down to motion blur in videos. Any time you pause a video when something is moving, it will appear blurred, which in most cases means you’re seeing a series of blurry images (it’s usually not down to the pausing itself or the player making it blurry). Which your brain has an easier time blending together than a crisp and clean image from a game, even at a higher framerate.

And while games do have motion blur sometimes, it’s done differently and doesn’t really look like proper motion blur from say a camera shooting it.

Difference in camera movement.
Usually for trailers and videos you setup a nice smooth curves for your camera movement, which will be quite “slow” and annoying for player during gameplay. Just play with matinee curves and you will see it for yourself

Matinee camera tracking rendered out at 4K 60 frames per second for the win.