[Feature Request] Sequencer (Matinee substitute)

Hello Epic folks :slight_smile:

I came to UE4 from 2d/3d motion graphics and video production field. It’s being great so far, we upgraded our workflow pipeline and removed ‘‘rendering’’ steps from it :slight_smile:
As I work with timelines and keyframes all day long, I would like to share some comments and ideas for the sequencer development. Some of them must seem obvious, others not viable or maybe its planned already, but costs nothing to reinforce :slight_smile:

Personally i loved the UI so far, remembers a lot Adobe Premiere and AE (which is a good thing) and seems to be much easier to do thing than Matinee.

Requests:

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Those were references i took from After Effects.

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Possibility to create keyframes interpolations (its a must have feature :D)

-Possibility to animate simple objects or imported meshes without bones (Position, Anchor Point or Pivot, Scale, Rotation, Opacity)
-Possibility to add multiple audio layers instead working in a single master audio.
-Possibility to group objects in the timeline
-Possibility to create multiples sequences inside one single Sequencer
-Export Movie directly from Sequencer without having tweaking blueprints
-Export separe passes (Diffuse, Light, Shadow, Reflections… This would be a realized dream if possible)
-Turn layers on and off

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Possibility to add expressions to parameters (Camera shake, noises… idk if this is possible already)

Questions:

Will be possible to keyframes materials inside sequencer?

Well, those are some ideas that i think will facilitate the general workflow inside sequencer.
Great work for you folks, i hope to be part of your team someday :slight_smile:

Best Regards.

I add some requests from me :stuck_out_tongue:

-Ability to sequence any variable, for example flagged with some specifier in UPROPERTY() or at least exposed to blueprint. 1st option would be more suitable as things like that would need a code on Tick() to update the state
-Also ability to call functions (blueprint exposed ofcorse) in sequencer would be cool too (kind of like you can execute logic on sequencer in LittleBigPlanet, ), so for example you can spawn something in sequence. And you could use variable states (pointers) as argument?

+1 Some Excellent Suggestions!

Pretty much all of these requests are planned for sequencer. Some of them are already possible with matinee as well.

These are already possible with Matinee. And there is Camera Shake BP and function which you can execute via level BP using an event track in Matinee.

Hi Jacky,

Are you sure you can animate objects without bones (skeletal mesh)? (I mean, keyframe animation). If yes, could u send me some related content link please? I’ve been looking for this in a while already.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the reply, I hope i helped in something :slight_smile:
Glad to know that most things are planned already.

When you create a group for an object in Matinee you get a Movement Track(if you dont, right click on the group you created and add a Movement track). It stores all the location and rotation info so you can, for instance, pick a cube and make it move along a path while rolling, or animate a door opening/closing. You can search Youtube for Matinee tutorials, this has been possible since UDK really.

I hope that by the time sequencer gets released we’ll finally be able to import FBX cameras natively from Maya without messed up translation and rotation values.

Thanks for that info Jacky :slight_smile:

Animating blueprint & material parameters in realtime when you fast-forward and fast-reverse through a sequence would be great too, I imagine that’s planned already. The current limitations of matinee + blueprint integration can be limiting in some cases, or slow down development.

Liked all the suggestions. +1.
I know the Matinee, own several of these options natively, and I think the challenge now was to make them more user friendly and easy to configure the user.

This mockup that Epic did Sequencer is great, this new interface is very nice, with the main functions within easy reach, perfect.

One suggestion would be greater control to use subtitles, as well as allowing insert an easier way subtitles in multi-languages​​.

Oh and exporting audio is a must too.

+1, great spotlights Wesley!

So, I’m starting to not making animations on 3ds max anymore and building them inside UE4 instead. I got some issues when scaling and rotating objects but I fixed it, using bluprints + events (rotation keyframes dont accept values above 360 degress, it goes back to 0).

But one thing that I really would like to request is a drag and drop for the keyframes over the timeline, instead of right clicking it and “set time”. Re-arrange keyframes will be a lot easier this way :slight_smile:

If you marquee select the keyframes with ctrl + alt then you can drag them by holding ctrl + mouse drag. Or just select and ctrl + mouse drag if it is a single keyframe.

Thanks Jacky,

that info helped a lot :slight_smile:
I was waiting for the campaign to begin to share the commercial: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HKhoC0VHBvs
most of the movements were made inside matinee (except the rotations above 360 degress, used blueprints). I would love to be able to create rotation keyframes above 360 :wink:

Thanks again :slight_smile:

Man I can’t tell you how useful this info is. I’m just getting into Matinee and I’ve been having a really hard time rearranging my camera keyframes to ‘edit’ the sequence.

I haven’t found a good tutorial on matinee intermediate level tips. Could anyone share a good link?

Glad you guys found it useful!

The majority of Matinee stuff comes from UDK so you can watch UDK Matinee tutorials and pass that knowledge over to UE4 really. Also, making more tutorials for Matinee is not a problem but we will have Sequencer soon, which will replace Matinee over time, so i dont know if it’d be worth it or not. :\

Has anyone found out how to enable Sequencer in 4.5?

As it is stated on Trello (Trello) that Sequencer is done in 4.5?

Anyhow,
I have only recently started using Unreal Engine v4.5 and I may just be missing it or only the foundation of Sequencer is in place via C++ would be my guess from looking at what little documentation, etc there is on the matter

Sequencer documentation: Sequencer | Unreal Engine Documentation (API) and nothing found under Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

p.s. thank you brunogbrito and for your well thought out and structured suggestions :slight_smile: