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Wes Bunn: All right everyone,
welcome back.
In the previous video we set up our project, which was pretty simple.
We imported some content from the Marketplace.
We downloaded an audio asset that we are going to use to score our cinematic.
Then, we opened the Forge map where we are going to create our content.
In this video, we are going to talk about Sequencer, the Sequencer Editor, Level Sequences,
Cinematic Viewports and how to enable them, etc.
I will give a quick introduction to the Sequencer Editor before we actually
get in there, and get our hands dirty.
Our project is loaded, let's continue.
The first thing we are going to talk about is the use of Cinematic Viewports.
Cinematic Viewports allow you to preview cinematics and the final result in realtime.
We can enable those inside of any viewport.
Before we do that, I want to give a quick primer to those of you who are
completely new to UE4. Sometimes
we may have artists coming from other disciplines, and people from other industries
come in and it is their first time with UE4 to check out this Sequencer tutorial series.
They may not know how to get around the viewport, which is going to be very important for
the rest of this tutorial series.
I am going to give a very quick primer on that. Inside the
viewport, you can rotate the camera around using Right Mouse Button (RMB).
While holding RMB, you can press W to move forward, S to move back, A to move left,
D to move right,
Q to move down, and E to move up.
There are other ways of navigating around, but holding down
RMB while pressing the W,A,S,D keys should get you started.
With that, let's talk about Cinematic Viewports.
Any viewport can be turned into a Cinematic Viewport. Typically,
the workflow I like is either have a 2nd monitor with my Cinematic Viewport
so that I can have a full viewport for level editing and construction.
I am going to show you a quick way we can get around this with working on one screen.
Click the Viewport Options drop down and go to Layouts.
There are several different options to display our viewports.
I am going to choose the vertical two panes.
That is going to give us two (2) viewports side-by-side.
One of them is a Wireframe, which is probably not helpful for cinematic creation.
Click the Top button and choose Perspective.
Click the Perspective button in the right viewport.
There is an option for Cinematic Viewport all the way down at the bottom.
You are looking at the Default Viewport now.
This is where you do your construction.
Cinematic Viewport is going to look very similar, but it is going to add some bars across the
top and bottom.
It is also going to give us an option to display overlays on this viewport.
If I wanted to, I could click the overlays display button.
I could add some gridlines, I could add Title Safe and Action Safe, if I wanted to.
I could change the color or size of these, if I wanted to.
We are going to click Disable for now because we don't need this, but it is there
if you would like to use it.
We still have our toolbar enabled across the top.
We are probably not going to need Grid Snapping and things like that because
this is our Cinematic Viewport.
To turn this off, click the Viewport options and uncheck Show Toolbar.
That will hide the toolbar from the top.
We still have editor icons, such as this warning bad size icon,
light bulbs, and all kinds of things.
We probably don't want this inside of our cinematic preview.
We can go into Game Mode in this viewport by pressing the G key.
That will hide all of those editor related icons, so we get a true representation
of what our scene will look like.
We can get those icons back by pressing the G key.
They will come right back.
Press the G key to toggle Game Mode on and off.
Our viewport is set up.
Across the very bottom it says, "No active Level Sequencer detected."
We need to open the Sequencer Editor to get some more controls in this viewport, such as
playback controls, etc.
How do we open a Level Sequence?
There are a couple different ways we can do that.
When you are first getting started, probably the most common way is to click the Cinematics
button at the very top.
It is going to give us a few options we can choose from.
I am going to work my way up from the bottom.
Add Matinee (Legacy), which is the legacy way of creating cinematics in UE4.
We have plenty of documentation on Matinee,
but we are going to stick to sequences since this is a Sequencer tutorial series.
Directly above that is Add Master Sequence, which we will talk about a little bit later.
This is useful if you are working on large teams and have created a storyboard, and know
every shot and angle, and how long they are.
A Master Sequence is pretty cool, and we will show you how that works a little bit later
in this series.
Directly above that is Add Level Sequence.
Select Add Level Sequence because this is going to create a new Level Sequence asset
and place an instance of it inside of our level. Select Add Level Sequence.
It is going to ask us where we want to save it and the name.
Add it to our Cinematics folder.
We will call it "Master".
Click Save.
Once it is done, it will open the Sequencer Editor.
This is not very useful to have in the middle of our viewport.
If you have a 2nd monitor, you can drag it offscreen.
Or, I drag the tab and dock the window next to the Content Browser, so that I can cycle
between them. The Content Browser
is typically where I use it.
Then, you can stretch the view up, or down, or however you would like.
Now that we are working inside of our Master Level Sequence, we now have an option to play
our scene in the viewport. Our scene has nothing in it at the moment,
but you can see our Timeline working.
We can go to the beginning or the end of the scene.
We can step through keyframes.
It also displays which shot we are currently working on, which is the Master right now.
Directly below that, we are looking at the Sequencer Editor.
On the right where our Timeline is, this is referred to as the Tracks area.
This is where you are going to be adding keyframes.
You can get around inside this area by right-clicking and dragging.
You can hold the CTRL key and scroll the mouse wheel up to zoom in.
Hold CTRL and scroll the mouse wheel down to zoom out.
That is how to zoom in and zoom out.
If you get all the way zoomed in and you want to go to the top level, you can press the
Home key to zoom all the way out
and it will center up your project.
There are two (2) markers in here: green and red.
As you might expect, the green is where you start.
The red is where you stop.
It is only going to play what is inside of this playback range.
If I press Play, it stops at 150.
You can drag the start and end to move them around however you want.
Whatever is inside of this playback range is what will play in your cinematic.
Over on the left, we have the Tree View or Tracks window.
This is where you are going to add the different types of tracks you will be using to
create your content.
Click the +Add button and you will see there are several different options for Events,
Shots, Camera Cuts, and Play Rates.
We are going to use quite a few of these as we go along.
You would add those here by clicking the +Add button.
Directly above that, there is a Sequencer toolbar.
We are not going to get into all of the options here. This is
broken down in the documentation if you would like to see what all of these do.
We will talk about a few of them a little bit later.
Feel free to check out the documentation, if you would like to see what all of these do.
There is a break down for what all of these are in the documentation.
Before we close out this video, I wanted to talk about the selling point of why
Sequencer is so cool.
It is a non-linear editor.
We could have several different shots on our Master Level Sequence for our sequence.
We can arrange those shots how we see fit.
For example, let's say we have one shot in this location, one shot in the middle, and
one shot at the end.
We could take those shots and arrange them around however we want as part of our playback.
That is something you couldn't do in Matinee.
In Matinee, everything was done in a particular level.
With Level Sequences they are self-contained assets,
so they are not bound to a particular level. In fact,
you can create a Level Sequence, save it in the Content Browser, open up a
new level and then drag that Level Sequence into the new level.
It is really cool that you can do that.
To demonstrate rearranging shots, let's create a shot and put it in our Master Level Sequence.
Click the Content Browser. Before, we clicked
Cinematics and added a Level Sequence, which added it to the level.
Select the Cinematics folder.
There is our Master Level Sequence.
Right-click, go under Animation, and select Level Sequence.
You can also access this by clicking the +Add button, under Animation and select Level Sequence.
We are going to add a Level Sequence.
Call this "Shot_01".
Click the Sequencer tab.
Click the +Add button in the Tree View.
Select Shot Track. Let's see what this does.
A Shot Track has been added.
There is a camera here. There is a plus sign (+).
Click +Shot to add a shot.
We don't want to add Master, but there is Shot_01 that we just created.
Select Shot_01 to add it.
It is going to add the shot to the location of your marker.
It added it at frame 133.
You can drag the this shot wherever you want on the Timeline, which is really cool.
You can do that.
Select Shot_O1 and press CTRL + W to duplicate it.
Now, we have Shot_02.
Press CTRL + W to create Shot_03.
You don't necessarily have to do this.
I just want to show you something real quick.
Click +Shot to add Shot_02. Click +Shot to add Shot_03.
Press CTRL and mouse wheel down to zoom out.
Move the red marker all the way to the end.
I can also do that by pressing the button to set playback at the end.
We can select Shot_02 and move that to the beginning.
Let's move Shot_01 to the end. Let's move Shot_03 to the middle.
You can do that right here inside of Sequencer.
If I go all the way back to the beginning and look at our Cinematic Viewport,
you can see we are on Shot_02.
Drag the marker to Shot_03, and then drag the marker to Shot_01.
If we change our mind, we can move the shots around as well.
It is very easy to move things around inside of Sequencer on a Shot Track.
These shots you are looking at are inside the Content Browser as Level Sequence assets.
The shots are their own self-contained assets inside of our Master Level Sequence, which
plays back all of those.
Shot_01, Shot_02, and Shot_03 do not exist in the level.
Only our Master Level Sequence, which is selected in the World Outliner, is inside of the level.
The Master Level Sequence contains Shot_02, Shot_01, and Shot_03.
It will playback those even though they are not in the level.
I can go into Shot_01, Shot_02, and Shot_03 by double-clicking on them inside Sequencer.
If I double-click Shot_01, we are now inside of Shot_01 and we can start editing its content.
We are still inside the Master. In fact, we can
jump back up to the Master Level Sequence by clicking this breadcrumb.
We can see the sequence as a whole, or we can work on individual shots.
We can go to Shot_01, we can go to Shot_03, or we can go to Shot_02 and work on that.
It is very easy to manipulate and work with individual shots
within an overarching cinematic sequence.
With all of that, that is the primer for Sequencer.
That is my elevator pitch and why Sequencer is cool.
There are a bunch of other things you will see
as we start to go along that make Sequencer so cool.
That is going to do it for this video.
We are going to pick it back up in the next video where we start creating our first shot.
We are going to add a character. We are going to animate that character.
We are going to add a camera, add some camera movement, play with some Filmback Settings
and focus settings.
We will have our first shot done by the end of the next video.
Let's pause here and pick it back up in the next video.
Thank you all for watching.
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