I’m working on a project in Unreal Engine 5 that requires displaying animated media. I have two primary options for handling this media within the engine:
Video File Playback (using the Media Source).
Image Sequence Playback (using an Image Sequence Media Source).
Which method is generally more efficient and why??
Hello there!!
That would depend on the exact animated media you need to show, as each tool covers different needs:
Video File Playback streams your video file, decodes it live, and feds it into a texture. It’s quite efficient, has low memory usage, and it’s quite good at syncing audio. However, quality will suffer a bit due compression, depending on your file’s format, and the codecs being used.
Image Sequence Playback has the engine loading individual frames as textures, then displays them sequentially. This results in no loss of quality, no compression or artifacts present, and full color scale. Yet, it can be a bit heavy on the memory load, and you need to handle your audio separately.
So, from what I could gather around the commmunity, the consensus would be that VFP is best used for cinematics, gameplay and/or cutscene with sound, where continuous playback is needed, and a bit of compression is expected.
On the other hand, ISP is better when working with virtual production, VFXs, or display walls, where you need good qualitiy, frame by frame, at all times.
For further reading, you can check the UE docs related to both features, here: