Update: G4 has posted the extended trailer from the game. Looks better than the original.

Original: Lead Animator, Tomas Hrebicek, has confirmed that the recently released Mafia II trailer was all created in real-time.

“It really was,” said Hrebicek. “All the scenes were completely created in our editor the same way we create cutscenes for the game. Our cutscene editor is a very powerful tool. Besides, we can see it all real-time which makes our work a lot easier. There was absolutely no need to modify the resulting video in the post production.

“Because everything was created solely in our editor, only our in-game scenes and models were used. So what you see here is great representation of the quality of work that you will see throughout Mafia II. Of course, this is not the end yet, and frame rate and other technical issues are still being tweaked in order to have the game working smoothly on all the platforms we create it for.”