I’ve seen that Pre-Rendered cinematics used in games offer a better quality than what it has to offer in Gameplay.
A good example for this would be BATMAN ARKHAM CITY, which they pre-rendered actual gameplay footage and used it as cinematic.
Look at this video.
and then look at actual gameplay footage
you notice that cinematic cutscenes have some cool effects that make it better than gameplay…
how do they achieve something like this?
then look at this video
you see that the same effect has been used here that make the video look better…
how could I achieve something like this pre-rendered scenes in Unreal Editor? I actually wanna pre-render my environment to use as cinematic.
Do i need extra programming?
AFAIK the most straightforward way to do it is ~turn up all the settings~ for the “cinematic” segments you want to pre-render. Eg. if you look at some of Koola’s work, etc. you can get some amazing results out of UE4, just that it won’t be realtime for a variety of low-to-mid-hardware.
So for example in the Post Process Volume you’d have a lot more effects, maybe layered DOF, additional post shaders, etc… you’d have more dynamic lights, certain high-poly versions of characters… More particle effects, more physics perhaps. You could turn up the Screen Space Reflection settings as well.
You’d turn up the quality by Screen Percentage = 200% say (a kind of Super Sampling AA).
Then “render” that out of Matinee at 4K PNG frame-by-frame then create video/ downsample to 2K etc using FFMPeg, then just play that video back as a “cutscene” in the normal shipping game.
You just render it offline to a video file, edit it a bit in video editing software they play the video back in-game. Gears of War did this to hide loading between levels, and to be honest, nearly all games use pre-rendered cinematics these days where possible. Matinee can render cinematic sequences out to movie files or image sequences, where you can then edit them in a video editing package.
Usually it’s because you put more content into the world or whatever, and the game can’t run it at your target framerate. The Solution is, pre-render it and just play a video.
Never been able to produce a nice sequence out of matinee. Even with upscaled resolution up to 4k. All my frames have artifacts/jaggies. When I record with shadowplay, it’s razor-sharp and neat tho. It’s frustrating because a single micro stutter and your recording isn’t good enough (with shadowplay). I wish I could make matinee export quality stuff!!!
Try rendering to frames instead of AVI movie. It shouldn’t look any different to how it does in-game… If you’re rendering at 4K however, the engine might drop resolution or graphics settings if your PC can’t perform well enough.
That’s what I do. Tried 1080p, 2k,4k…I have a decent pc and a gtx 980. I swear matinee export isn’t taking half of the post process effects into account when saving frames!!! Aliasing being the worst.
And you’ve rendered the entire thing and dropped it into a video editor and the artefacts are still there? The preview you see when Matinee renders is neither tonemapped nor has post-process applied, but if you look at the actual image it saves, it has all the correct effects applied.
Yea I’m talking about the rendered frames, once imported in adobe premiere. I’ll try to post one of those frames so you can see a comparison between an exported frame vs one captured by shadow play.
sorry if this is off topic or hijacking your thread as it’s probably a newbie question, but how exactly do you load frames in matinee? i’m working on a scene and the only way i seem to be able to apply effects is by creating a post process volume and then recording with 3rd party software while playing my cinematic. i couldn’t even turn AA on without my pc slowing to a crawl. is there a different way to do this?
