🎥 Cinematics with Sequencer

From Gameplay to Directed Shots

Everything you animated before this point moved because of gameplay logic. A character walked because a Blueprint read the controller; a door opened because the player overlapped a trigger. That motion is reactive and its timing changes every session. A cinematic is the reverse: the director decides exactly what moves, when, and for how long, and it must replay identically every time. You are no longer writing rules for a system to interpret. You are laying events on a timeline.

If you have ever used a video editor or a 2D animation tool, the mental model transfers cleanly. Time runs left to right. Things you want to control get their own rows. You mark values at specific moments and the tool fills in the motion between them. What makes Sequencer special is that the "things" are live actors in your 3D level, and the "values" are any property those actors expose.

The Level Sequence and Its Timeline

Open a Level Sequence and the Sequencer panel appears with two halves: an outliner on the left listing everything the sequence controls, and a timeline on the right where that control plays out over time. Four ideas make up almost everything you will do here: bindings, tracks, sections, and keyframes.

Bindings: what the sequence controls

An empty sequence controls nothing. To animate an actor you bind it into the sequence, which creates a row for it in the outliner. There are two kinds of binding, and the difference matters:

Tracks, sections, and keyframes

Under each binding you add tracks, one per thing you want to animate: a Transform track to move it, an Animation track to play a clip on a character, a visibility track, a material track, and so on. A track holds one or more sections, each a bar covering a span of time. Inside a section you place keyframes: a keyframe records a property's value at a specific frame, and Sequencer interpolates smoothly between one keyframe and the next. Set the camera at position A on frame 0 and position B on frame 120, and you get a 5 second dolly move with two keys.

Some tracks do not belong to any single actor. These sequence-level tracks (also called master tracks) sit at the top of the outliner: the Camera Cuts track that chooses which camera is live, plus Fade and Audio tracks. You will use Camera Cuts in Section 4.

Figure: The Sequencer timeline. The outliner (left) lists sequence-level tracks and per-actor bindings; the timeline (right) shows each track's sections and keyframes · the red playhead marks the current frame, and the shaded band is the playback range.

Two timeline settings round this out. The playback range (the shaded band, bounded by green and red markers) defines where the sequence starts and ends. The display rate sets the frame rate you author in; film work is typically 24 fps, so a 120 frame range is exactly 5 seconds. Here is the same structure as a tree:

flowchart TD
    LS[Level Sequence asset] --> CC[Camera Cuts track
sequence-level]
    LS --> B1[Binding: Cine Camera Actor]
    LS --> B2[Binding: Character]
    B1 --> T1[Transform track
keyframes]
    B2 --> T3[Animation track
walk / idle clip]
    B2 --> T4[Transform track
keyframes]
    style LS fill:#ede7f6,stroke:#7e57c2
    style CC fill:#fff3cd,stroke:#ffc107
                    

The Cine Camera: Lens, Aperture, Focus

You could point an ordinary Camera Actor at your scene, but cinematics use the Cine Camera Actor, which models a real film camera. Instead of a single "field of view" slider it gives you the controls a cinematographer actually uses, and those controls are what make a frame read as filmic rather than game-like.

Two of these dials do most of the visual work:

• Focal length controls the angle of view. A short focal length (say 18mm) is wide: it takes in a lot of the scene and exaggerates depth. A long focal length (85mm and up) is a telephoto: it is tight, flattens perspective, and isolates the subject. The default cine camera sits around a natural 35mm.
• Aperture (f-stop) controls depth of field, the band of distance that appears sharp. A wide aperture like f/1.4 gives a shallow, dreamy focus with a blurred background; a narrow aperture like f/16 keeps almost everything sharp. Low f-number means shallow focus.

Focus then decides where that sharp band sits. You can set a manual focus distance, or use tracking focus that locks onto an actor and stays sharp as it moves. The diagram shows how focal length and aperture shape the image:

Figure: Focal length sets the angle of view; the aperture (f-stop) sets the depth of field, the band of distance that stays sharp; focus distance places that band on your subject.

To see through a Cine Camera while you work, you pilot it or lock it to the viewport, so the editor view becomes exactly what that camera captures. Frame your subject, dial the focal length and focus, and you have composed a shot. Here is the "Kat" character from Lesson 1, now the Skeletal Mesh SK_Anya, staged on a landscape and framed through a Cine Camera Actor bound in a Level Sequence:

Figure: A shot composed in Sequencer. The SK_Anya character was placed on a stage, bound into a Level Sequence alongside a Cine Camera Actor, and lit from the front · captured from the Unreal level viewport, framed to that camera's pose in the ClaudeTest project.

Assembling Shots with Camera Cuts

One camera gives you one angle. A scene needs several: a wide to establish, a close-up for emotion, an over-the-shoulder for a conversation. In Sequencer you place several Cine Camera Actors, bind them all, and then let the Camera Cuts track decide which one the audience is looking through at any moment.

Editing, then, is just arranging colored bars on that one track. Cut from the wide to the close-up by ending the wide section and starting the close-up section on the same frame. Because the track is on the timeline, your edit is frame-accurate and repeatable.

flowchart LR
    subgraph Cameras
      CA[Cam A
wide 24mm]
      CB[Cam B
close-up 85mm]
      CC[Cam C
over-shoulder 50mm]
    end
    CA --> CUT[Camera Cuts track]
    CB --> CUT
    CC --> CUT
    CUT --> OUT[What the audience sees
Cam A → Cam B → Cam C]
    style CUT fill:#fff3cd,stroke:#ffc107
    style OUT fill:#e8f5e9,stroke:#4CAF50
                    

Scaling up: master sequences and shots

A single Level Sequence is enough for one shot or a short scene. A whole film would be unmanageable in one timeline, so production uses a master sequence that contains a Shots track, where each shot is its own sub-sequence. Each shot holds its own cameras, animation, and timing, and the master stitches them in order. This is the same nesting you saw for sub-sequences, applied to organize an entire edit.

flowchart TD
    MS[Master Sequence] --> S1[Shot_010
sub-sequence]
    MS --> S2[Shot_020
sub-sequence]
    MS --> S3[Shot_030
sub-sequence]
    S1 --> D1[its own cameras,
animation, cuts]
    S2 --> D2[its own cameras,
animation, cuts]
    S3 --> D3[its own cameras,
animation, cuts]
    style MS fill:#ede7f6,stroke:#7e57c2
                    

A Repeatable Shot Workflow

Every shot you build in Sequencer follows the same rhythm. Learn it once and it scales from a five second test to a full scene. The figure of SK_Anya above was built with exactly these steps.

That leaves one thing undone: turning the previewed sequence into a finished video file at full quality. Previewing in the editor is not the same as rendering, and doing it properly (with anti-aliasing, warm-up, and the right output settings) is the whole subject of the next lesson.

Hands-On: Direct Your First Shot

You need only a character or a mannequin and an empty level to practice the entire loop. Work through these steps and you will have a real, replayable shot.

Knowledge Check

Summary

You turned Unreal into a film set. Here is the arc:

Sequencer and the Level Sequence. A Level Sequence stores directed animation on a timeline, edited in Sequencer. Unlike gameplay, it is frame-accurate and repeatable. You bind actors into it (possessable or spawnable), give each binding tracks, fill tracks with sections, and set values with keyframes that interpolate over time.

The Cine Camera. A Cine Camera Actor gives you real optical controls: focal length sets the angle of view, aperture sets depth of field, and focus places the sharp plane. Because they are all animatable, you can rack focus and zoom on the timeline.

Shot assembly. Bind several cameras and let the Camera Cuts track choose which is live over time, which is how you edit. At production scale a master sequence holds a Shots track of sub-sequences, one per shot.

Where this goes next

Your shot is staged, framed, and cut, but it only exists as a preview inside the editor. The final lesson, Rendering Output, takes that Level Sequence and produces finished frames with the Movie Render Queue: output formats, anti-aliasing and warm-up settings, and the choice between the deferred renderer and path tracing. That is the last step of the Unreal half of the Story-to-Screen pipeline, mapped by the Phase 7 Output page.