That means that "directly captured from a PS3" was a more confusing statement to make back then than it is now, since back then it could at least just as easily have meant (and indeed did mean) prerendered cutscenes as they will appear ingame.
It was either one or the other. Now in UC4 there will only be one kind of cutscenes - real-time ones. They would never do full-Out CGI that had nothing to do with their engine, because they never did anything like that. It was always either gameplay or fmvs. What they gave us at E3 should be seen as at least indicative of how this scene will look in the game as it will be rendered in real time on a single machine. Of course cutscenes can have better faces than traversal, and they have still time to optimize the engine - which is why at this moment the engine is not capable of running this scene at rock solid 60fps, otherwise they would have told us the magic words "realtime" already. (Why put out a teaser that occasionally drops one or two frames just to prove a point? They can do that at GDC if they like) But wether the current build achieves this at 20 or 59 fps we don't know. We know, however, that optimization is ND's magic wand (they had enormous performance issues with their train scene in UC2, and look how it turned out) AND we know that the game will more or less look exactly like this. And that... is exciting, isn't it
EDIT:
Ah, well in that case confusion is a tad more understandable if that was the first time they did that. Thought someone had mentioned this "captured directly" line had already been in one of the UC2 teasers. If that's not the case, it doesn't change my point but I get why that line was even more irritating (I mean it still is for ppl, otherwise this thread would not be)
- but conclusively what this line should tell us then, is that they have no reason to work their asses off just to achieve that in realtime over a year prior to release, when instead they could show us what the engine should be able to do once the game is out. It shows us their vision (and it's very concrete), but obviously not in realtime, therefore they won't say it. But the mere fact that they needed 8 PS3s to prerender their fmvs and now confidently confirm they did this on a single machine tells me they will get very close to getting this to realtime. in fact they aim even better than this. And I believe them