Sequencer: custom burnt in info & no update of clip names?

Development Cinematics & Media
1

Hi all!

As a filmmaker I’m working nowadays a lot with unreal, to make an animatic, a storyboard with moving images.
that way I can do research on my camera movements, focal lengths, think about tempo and so on.
So I’m working a lot with the sequencer.

Now I need to go with this animatic to other colleagues (DOP, actors) and discuss with them several possibilities.
I’ve found already several burn-in options. Which will be very helpful.
An annoying thing I notice is the change of the name. When I rename for example a shot in my cinematics folder, it won’t be changed in the “timeline” of the sequencer. I have to remove it and add it again so that I have an update of the shot name.

Am I missing something here?

Next to that, it would be good to add for example some text of the screenplay or other extra info. So in short: I’m looking for a way to add custom info to shots.
Is this built into Unreal? Or do I need to export everything to editing software?

Thank you all for your help,
Lieven

2

maybe you can try the unreal gui stuff? UMG UI Designer | Unreal Engine Documentation

3

Hi YuuJin,

Thank you, yes, that could be an idea, it will be my best shot maybe because I’ve searched around in these tutorials and the text is still on top of the image.
I don’t find a way to have a black overlay or something like that.

Thanks,
Lieven

4

Would there be any help about the renaming problem of the shots?

5

Hi All,

For now, I renamed everything manually. :rolleyes: It took me 5 hrs.
Anyway, moving on, and trying to reduce my manual work. I still would like to add custom text in the burnt in info.
I’m looking closer into the unreal gui stuff.

I’ve made a long breakdown in a google sheet. Each shot has a description. It would be a dream if I could link burnt in info in unreal to the description I made in that google sheet. It contains manually written info of 250 shots.

For example, I could try to create an array of text out of that info and perform a search in the blueprint on shotname, and link the according text to the burnt in info?
Does anybody have experience with that?

Thank you,
Lieven

6

if you know python you can use google sheets api to pull info from and do things to unreal objects
but it’s pretty technical. beyond my skillset.

I just know it’s doable because in-house we did some batch rendering with google spread sheets
but probably not needed with the new stuff in 4.25

7

Hi YuuJin, thanks for your reply. I’ll think I’ll wait until 4.25 instead of now losing a lot of time by researching the python.
I’ve found a solution using an external editor and photoshop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7BbPxSbZ4M