Recording with Matinee Issues

ELRIIC · November 3, 2015, 6:10pm

I have created a Matinee Sequence for an Architectural Visualization Map.
It supports multiple cameras that pass through the level in order to showcase it.

When I try to export Matinee into a Movie, I run into two problems:

Note that both issues appear only when the record window of Matinee appears, and they are not occurring if you Play the Matinee Sequence through the Matinee Window in the editor.

1) Screen Space Reflections are different.
My Map has a post process volume that sets the Quality of Screen Space Reflections to 100. When recording the Matinee Sequence into an AVI or any kind of Screenshot Sequence, the Screen Space Reflections appear different, like their quality was dropped to 50.
Note that I also changed the quality to 100 in all the cameras I use in the Matinee Sequence, but this did not fix the issue.

2) Performance Issue
When I hit play in the Editor, my map has more than 60 FPS in half HD and around 35 in Full HD. When I play the Matinee Sequence through the Matinee Window, I have the same FPS results, everything runs smoothly.
When recording the Matinee Sequence into an AVI or any kind of Screenshot Sequence, there is staggering in the camera, like spikes in FPS. These are also visible in the exported .AVI.

Note that I record the Matinee Sequence in 1280x720, disabled Texture Streaming and closing the Editor in case it improves performance.

I tried to find solutions for both online but not much luck.
Can anyone help for any of these two?

Thanks in advance.

ELRIIC · November 12, 2015, 5:00pm

So, after a lot of digging and testing, I have the solution for both issues mentioned above.

1) Screen Space Reflections are different.
This was a general issue related with the quality of the visual in anything outside the Editor.

Inside the Editor, under Settings/Engine Scalability Settings, you setup the Visual Quality for the Editor only. These apply while you edit or play through it. When you launch a standalone version (by your own or when recording through Matinee), these settings don’t apply at all.

It seams that the engine runs by default in a set of settings (High in my case, instead of Epic). Everything is affected visually because of this (lighting, shadows etc), but in my case it was more very noticeable on the Reflections.

In order to overcome this, and to have the same settings in game with the ones from the Editor, you need to set their values through Blueprint.

Attached you can find an image of the Level Blueprint, where at the Begin Play, I set all the Scalability Settings to maximum, to mirror the Epic Settings from the Editor. Tweak the numbers if you want to achieve lower quality.

2) Performance Issue
This was occurring only when recording with Matinee.

It seams that when you record in any format through the Editor, your Performance is heavily affected. The .AVI format wasn’t good in any resolution since I was getting spikes all the way through.

The only solution was to render in an Image Format (I went with BMP), and then compose the Image Sequence in a Video Editing Program.

Note that even if you staggering and huge FPS drops when it records, the frames are exported normally, and you get a smooth image sequence when you export it from your Video Editor.