Original subtitles

you can't make films in unreal if you haven't mastered

sequencer

this is the timeline where you can add animations to

characters lights and effects

whether you're completely new to unreal filmmaking

or you just want to speed up your workflow

this is for you

make it easy to get up and running inside of sequencer

and take everything I've Learned from the last 8 years

I worked as an artist and supervisor

on Hollywood visual effects

I'm movies like Star Wars 9

Fantastic Beasts and across the Spiderverse

and I started using Unreal Engine as an onset

operator in virtual production on Netflix's

The Last Airbender

and when you use unreal on set

you have to be ready to make any change at the last

minute and when the whole crew around you is waiting

you have to make those changes in seconds

that's why you have to be fast

nimble and smarter inside of sequencer

so I put together a list of

20 of my favorite sequencer hotkeys and tips

to make your workflows even faster

inside of sequencer

we're gonna move quick

select this video so you can jump back to it later

and stick around until the end

because I'll share my favorite tip on how to add

slow motion or bullet time all inside of sequencer

you're gonna want to hear this

let's jump right in

to 20 of my favorite tips inside of sequencer

so here I am in the project file for war of being

and I'm gonna open up one of these level sequences

and let's start with the basics

so pressing play will play through your sequence

this thing in the middle is our

time indicator that we can scrub along and decide

our frame a really important note for visual

effects is you need to have this

magnet icon enabled

d is the hot key here

and this will

snap your time indicator to a whole frame

if I zoom in here and I

disable this magnet you can see I can scrub in between

our frames here

but this will add

stuttering and

jitteriness to your renders if you create

keyframes in between any whole frames

so make sure that's enabled

the next hot key to note is Jackal so JK and L

J will reverse your timeline

K will pause it and L will play it forward

so just remember Jackal

and if you don't use hotkeys you can do the same thing

with these buttons down here

we have play forward

play in reverse

and then we can step forward by one frame

you can also use your arrow

keys to step forward by one frame

or you can press

shift and then the left and right arrow keys

to jump ahead

or backwards by five frames

now you can change

the amount of frames that we jump forward here

instead of 5

by going into your playback options

and just changing this jump frame increment

to something like 15

and now you can make much bigger jumps

throughout your scene

then if you want to snap back to the first

frame in our output range you can just press the

up key and that will jump to the first frame

and the down key

actually will just play back your sequence

so if you want to jump to that last frame

just press

Ctrl and the up key and that will snap to our last

frame I can right click in sequencer to drag around

up and down throughout the menu

I can press the minus

key to zoom out or the plus key to zoom in

I can also control that with these little sliders here

our green in and out points are our active frame range

so you can drag these around or press the left

or right bracket key

to move those in and out

and this is the frame range that Movie Render Q

will render by default

and if you just want to preview your

active timeline you can press the F

key to frame up on your sequencer timeline

and that will make your

in and out points be the center

of your sequence

now the entire reason

we're using sequencer is to add animations and

keyframes into our timeline here

so if you want to

jump to any keyframe just click on that

keyframe and your time indicator will jump right to it

and if you just want to jump

forward or backwards across our keyframes

it's really simple as well

just select a track and then use the comma

and period keys to jump forward and backwards

between any keyframes

now this example already has a lot of keyframes in it

so to keep it simple

let's set up a scene completely from scratch

so here we are in

our graveyard sequence

and I've

taken our two characters and we've imported them

in the scene so from here

all we'd have to do is right click in our content

browser

go to cinematics and create a new level sequence

so now we have an empty level sequence

now you'll also want to change over your frames

per second here

from 30 frames per second

over to 24 which is the standard framerate for movies

and the first thing to do is start to add our

characters and cameras

into sequences

so there's a couple ways we can do this

the first and easiest

is just to drag that reference from the outliner

into sequencer and it'll automatically add it

the other way I'll click on our other samurai

is to add this actor to sequencer

through the Add Track button

and this will do the same exact thing

and the last way the hotkey that I try to use

is you have to select your object in the viewport

and then press Ctrl a

and you'll see that pops into our sequencer here

and if this isn't working for you

just make sure you right click inside of sequencer

before pressing any hotkeys

to make sure you're communicating with sequencer

now with characters

the first thing to do is to add in animation

so I'm going to import our motion capture

animation here

and now we can see our motion capture is imported

now the next thing we want to do is add in a camera

and start keyframing the animation

so you need two

things to render a camera out of sequencer

one is a

cynic camera and the other is a camera cut track

so there's two methods for that

the easiest by far is just to click on this

create a new camera icon

and this will create a camera from your specific view

but you should also know it's easy to create

custom hotkeys for any

option inside of sequencer to make that even faster

so let's make a hotkey for creating a new camera

if I go to Edit Editor Preferences

I'm gonna type in camera

and scroll down to the sequencer hotkeys here

and you can see that the create

camera currently doesn't have

a hotkey so one that I like to use

so that I don't press it on accent

is Ctrl shift Alt C

I still like to use the C for the camera icon

but obviously with

Ctrl C it's a widely used hotkey

but now I can go around in the scene

find a nice spot and just press Ctrl shift Alt C

and it will create a new camera

now this camera

came in with this little lightning bolt icon

and that just means that this is a spawned actor

meaning if I close this level sequence

there's no camera inside of our 3D world

and now I can even search for a cynic camera

and it won't show up

for cameras

I almost always convert these to possessable

because I just want them to live inside of the scene

and now it'll

exist regardless if I close sequencer or not

now this isn't a hotkey but this is my most useful tip

in terms of animating characters and cameras

and that's using a stage actor

I like to parent both my characters

and my camera to the same parent actor

so I'll take my Cinecamer actor and parent it to this

empty actor this mocap stage

and then we can start to rotate it around our scene

and you'll notice our composition stays

exactly the same

by the way

if you want to download all of these hotkeys and more

all in one place

you can get that for free

when you sign up for Unreal Fundamentals

start as a complete beginner and unreal

to making your own

action scenes in just 30 minutes a day

check it out at unrealforvfx

com fundamentals

but the real power of sequencer

is animating different details of any actor

inside of sequencer

now you'll notice

by just looking through the camera options here

that we have a couple little

keyframe icons inside of the details panel

and this is by far the fastest way

to add keyframes for things like

focal length and aperture

now we have these three keyframes set

and if I enable auto keyframe this icon here

I can scrub later on

and adjust something like the zoom

and it'll automatically animate

between our two keyframes

but one thing that can be really confusing early on

is that you don't see any of these add

keyframes next to our location and rotation option

but obviously the most common thing to do

is to animate the transform

so to create any property inside of sequencer

we need to add a track

so for our cinecamer actor

let's add in a transform track

and this will give us location

rotation and scale and allow us to set two keyframes

and animate between them

now I can see that the animation's a little offset here

so I'm just gonna select all of these keyframes

and then press

Ctrl and right arrow key and that will just

nudge these keyframes by one frame

until I like the animation

now I'm gonna delete this entire transform track here

and show you the hot key

in this case

all you have to do is select your actor and press the

s key and we can see we've automatically created

keyframes on our location and rotation settings

now we've selected this

actor and if you look at the

gizmo in the center of the frame here

I press the W E and R keys

that will go from transform rotation and scale

by just adding the shift key to those same

exact hot keys

we can quickly create

transform rotation

and scale keyframes

and that's the fastest way to add those in

but a lot of times it's nice to look

through the camera

lens and adjust the composition intuitively

so to do that

all you have to do is click on this little

pilot icon next to our Cinecamera actor

the hot key here is shift P to pilot your camera

you can see where that we're piloting on the top left

and now we can pilot this around

and because we have auto keyframe enabled

this will automatically update

and we can quickly change our animation

so that's piloting your camera

but the first track of any sequencer should be

this camera cuts track

this is what movie renderq will decide to render

and when you view this camera instead of piloting it

which is shift C for the hotkey

if you're viewing your camera cut

you can't adjust this camera at all

I'm right clicking in the viewport

but I'm not able to actually change the transform

so when you're ready to lock down your camera

this is the best option is don't pilot your camera

view the camera cut

and then you'll never have to worry about

changing your animation

another way to set this up is you can

right click on any actor

and lock this actor

and you'll see that all of our tracks turn red

and this means that we can't adjust any

keyframes inside of sequencer

just make sure to right click and unlock it

when you want to make any changes

you can also pin any actor to the top of sequencer

so now I'll always have this Cinecamera actor

at the top of our sequence

so if you only want to adjust one thing

and oftentimes that will be the camera

you can just pin it to the top of sequence

but I can't stress enough that you can

really animate any

property inside of sequencer

even down to the materials

so what if I wanted to change the color

or intensity of our gold samurai's eyes here

well that exists in this element 0 material

well we could adjust that in this first material here

by changing the emissive strength

brighter or lower

by setting it to 0 it turns off

but what if I only wanted to change it inside of this

one shot and not for our entire project file

well I can't drag this emissive strength into sequencer

but I can keep adding in tracks

until I can find this emissive strength

let's go to add a tract

and here we can see this skeletal mesh component

now if I look on the right side of our details panel

we can see that it's the skeletal mesh component

is inside of this actor

that has all of these details underneath it

so we need to add in the skeletal mesh component

track in order to animate anything inside of here

once this is added we can add another track

to adjust the material parameters

of any one of our materials

so let's select element 0 and add a parameter here

and now we can easily find that emissive strength

and it will automatically create a keyframe

so now if I set this to 0

you can see that it updates inside a sequencer

but again when I close sequencer

and I look back at our yellow samurai

you can see that his eyes have returned to normal

so if you're not

finding the property that you want to animate

keep diving in

to the tracks and go deeper and deeper

into this hierarchy inside of your details panel

to find what you're looking for

another thing you should know about is the

Camera Preview

I personally like to disable this

but people have different preferences

so if you go to the

Editor Preferences and type in Camera Preview

I'll toggle back on preview selected camera

and this will give us an additional viewport

that we can pin at any time

let me change this down to a size of 3

and minimize this window

and how this works is you'll just press on this little

pin icon

and now you'll have this little preview window

docked to the side of your viewport at any time

and this can make it easier to adjust your scene

while still previewing your camera

all you have to do is unpin this preview

and as soon as you select anything else in your scene

that preview will go away

now I tend to always just use

the shift C hotkey to view the camera cut

but use whatever is easy

now if you ever want to hide the details of any

object in sequencer

just select it and press the V key

and that will hide everything below it

or if you want to

expand any detail that can be keyframed

press shift V

to reveal it and that will show you every single

object and expand any of these hidden dropdowns

now as soon as you start to add a lot of things in

your sequencer can get pretty messy

so to organize it you can just press Ctrl F

to search for anything inside the sequencer

I'm just going to search for the samurai

and now I can select both of these and press Ctrl G

this will create a new folder and add these

actors into that folder

so now I can just rename this as characters

and now it's really

easy to hide these

or show them whenever they're needed

often times I'll make anywhere from 20 to 40

cameras for a single shot

so when I find something I'm happy with

I'll take

all of the old cameras and throw them into a folder

so they still exist

but they're hidden from the rest of sequences

now if you have character

animation and you want to modify it further

inside of sequencer

you have two options for that

you can either edit this with an FK control rig

now this will not give you

the controls you're probably looking for

if you have a humanoid character

but this will convert your skeleton into an FK

control rig so you can modify any bone

but the way we did this on war of being was we created

control rigs for all of our characters

so we could bake our animation onto this control rig

that makes it very easy for us to go back

and add any modifications to certain keyframes

but in this case we have an IK rig

so our hands and feet will stay in the same

exact place

but we can still move around the rest of the body

now you can also add in additive tracks

so you don't have to modify every single keyframe

you can just

identify a single bone that you want to adjust

like these hips

so as an example

I'll just tilt him over to do something really

obvious and awkward

and just create a simple keyframe

and now for the entire rest of the animation

we'll have that offset

you can do this for the hands

feet or anything else inside of your scene

to make quick adjustments to your animation

lastly let's talk about

slow motions and how to add bullet time

all inside of sequencer

now if you want to stretch in squash or just re

time your keyframes

you have a couple options here which make it pretty

easy

the first if I want to change these transform keyframes

would be to grab this gray

track at the top of any

property that's keyframed

and you can simply drag these in and out points

and you'll see that they scale

and retime correctly

but let's say you just wanted to retime the end

and not the entire sequence

that could get a little tricky

but they built a tool for that as well

if you press Ctrl

m you'll get this hidden transform menu here

and this will let you offset your keyframes

forwards or backwards by 10 units

or you can make this twice as long

or you could divide these by two

so they'll go twice as fast

so you can quickly double or half

any amount of keyframe animation

but with this transform menu

you just select the keyframes you want

so you don't affect your entire frame range

but in my opinion

the best way to add slow motion is to create a time

dilation track

just look through this drop down here

and add it into your scene

and this will give us a time multiplier we can apply

across our entire world

so if I set this down to something really low like.25

you'll see that even the birds and the animated water

texture on our ground

are all moving at

one fourth the speed of our original scene

so this is the most

universal way to apply this to your scene

and when I play back our sequence

you'll see that our

actors are also moving in slow motion

you can even animate these

so I can start slow and get faster at the end

so you have a lot of

control once you add in this time dilation track

and lastly I think a lot of beginners can be confused

by the rendering process inside of unreal

and I totally get it

this was definitely the hardest thing to comprehend

at the very beginning

but the real important thing that you have to know

which will hopefully demystify this entire thing

is that whenever you go to render

local out of movie renderq

what happens is our game

starts to play and our physics begin to simulate

now this can be very confusing because we're not really

playing a video game inside of Unreal Engine

we really just want to playback sequencer

but we can't preview our final

render because this is not through our camera

but even if we did and look through our camera cut here

we could start on the first frame

but the timing is not exact here it's not correct

and our render would actually look slightly

different than what we're seeing here

so how can we fix that

well the way to preview your render exactly

inside of your viewport

is actually really simple

let's browse to our level sequence here

all we have to do is click and drag this

level sequence and add it into our scene

now this is an actor just like anything else

just like our camera or our particles or our lights

they're just actors inside of the scene

and all we have to do is set this to autoplay

and I'll set the loop to loop indefinitely

now the next time that we go to press play

we'll automatically snap into this

level sequence and we'll be able to preview

exactly what we'll see

out of movie renderkey

now something's not looking right at this stage

you should expect it to not look right in your final

render

so go back and make any adjustments at this stage here

and to swap this out for another level sequence

all you have to do

is either drag that other level sequence in

or you can select any other

level sequence from this drop down

and from here you can use the hotkey

alt key to play your game

or you can also simulate your game

which is playing your game

without controlling a pawn

and now when you simulate

your level sequence will play back

but you won't be looking through the camera

so you

can view your 3D seen from an outside perspective

so you can press Alt s to simulate your game

you can press escape

to stop game mode

or you can go back and play

your selected viewport here

and if you ever want to get your

mouse cursor back you can press shift and F1

and now you can select anything

inside of your scene and start making adjustments

while your game is playing

now this took me just a couple seconds to explain

but honestly it took me months to learn

how this entire system works together

so leave a like down below

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