Getting Started With Matinee

Today we’ve got a great Matinee tutorial that cinematics director has put together for you guys!
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Greetings to you from the Epic Cinematics Team! Today we’re launching the first of our tutorials on using Matinee](A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums) – our dedicated cinematics tool in Unreal Engine 4. Through the production of 11 game titles and numerous visual demos at Epic, we’ve shaped the design and function of Matinee and it has progressed into the mature tool it is today. It’s simple enough to handle basic animation and object paths, yet very powerful in creating complex scenes such as Elemental](UE4 Elemental Demo | Unreal Engine - YouTube) or Infiltrator](UE4 Infiltrator Real-Time Demo | Unreal Engine - YouTube). The best part is that Matinee isn’t an add-on. It’s available right now, in UE4!

There’s a lot covered in this first introduction of the tool, but it should be just enough to get you started. First we’ll teach you some basics about the Matinee interface and how it works. You’ll then learn how to connect objects to Matinee, animate their movement over time, and view everything through a cinematic camera. Finally, we’ll show you how to view and play the sequence through connections in Blueprint.

We’re just scratching the surface with this tutorial and our team has much to share from years of working with Matinee. We’ll follow up very soon with some additional tips and tricks we’ve used along the way. Plus, there’s already a lot of great reference for Matinee in the Unreal Engine 4 Documentation: Animating Characters and Objects in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation](Animating Characters and Objects in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation)

And remember, if you have any specific questions about Matinee, let us hear about it below or hit me up on Twitter at @](/). The Epic Cinematics Team and others are here to help and provide answers. Enjoy the tutorial and we look forward to your feedback!

Sweetness! Now i know where to direct people when they come up with Matinee questions. :slight_smile:

It would be awesome if you could also give completed projects at the end of the tutorials. Sometimes it helps to look at finished project to correct the mistakes when working on tutorials.

There are Matinee sequences you can check and break in most of the projects you can find in the marketplace. And the project in the tutorial is what you get with a blank project with starter assets i believe. It is as basic as it gets and everything is explained in detail so there is no way you can miss a step really. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reply Jacky. My comment was generic not for this project alone. Also it would be awesome if we can have a complete 2d or 3d game tutorial. It can be real small but it helps to see the full workflow.

Hi !

There’s a more advanced Matinee project coming soon that will allow you to dig in and see how we use the tool for creating cinematic scenes. Michael Clausen will be creating some support tutorials to give you more insight into how we use Matinee for our own projects.

Cheers!

Personally I’m excited about it’s replacement/improvement, ‘Sequencer’. I think that part of the engine is on the back-burner right now though.

One thing I would like Matinee to do, be able to export a soundtrack even if you’re not exporting a movie in real-time… Should feature request that badboy.

I had made a request like that actually(sound recording while capturing a video frame by frame). Maybe we’ll get more options with Sequencer in the future.