Question What's your experience making short movies in Unity? Virtual production.

This tool really gets in the way when doing in-game sequences so I was wondering if it's better when doing offline productions.
How you handle shots, takes, nesting, sub sequence-only objects, scene organization, performance issues etc...
Do you do final edit in the timeline?
Crash, data losses (had tons of those in 2020.1)?

 

As a thought experiment and to gain experience because I'll want to make cutscenes at some point, and to see if it can be done, I've tried to make several different trailers within Unity, as I thought... it's got Timeline, Animator timelines and Animation Legacy timelines, and Prefabs and Scenes and Cinemachine provides hundreds of cameras... etc. Plus there's an Audio Mixer... so it should be possible, as they also claim it is...

This wasn't all at once. I am a sucker for punishment and try it again, after each milestone in production in each new version as I move through game production.

Each time, despite engine upgrades and new releases of everything (Timeline, Cinemachine, TextMeshPro etc), the problems are legion.

Each time, I get flummoxed and resort to using Quicktime Screen Recordings of videos of the good stuff, by making isolated little bits that do their thing, and edit all the pieces up in something else.

There's so many things that go wrong and so many workflows and considerations and caveats and showstoppers that have to be worked around and through and over that it's maddening.

Have experience with almost all compositors, all the video editors, most of the colour grading plugins, and 3D rendering experience ie. jumping from one app to another to get things done in a final edit.

 

Ouch, so how do these productions I read about in the Unity blog do it?

 

I'm not saying it can't be done.

Just that it's way less 'fun' than doing it by any other means.

For those without experience in other forms of video production, they have nothing to compare experiences with, nor another means to achieve whatever they're doing.

For me, the experiences I've had with Unity's Timeline have led to changing game onboarding such that cutscenes are a minimal part of everything. It's too unfun to bother with, if I can find other ways to engage and powerup players.

 

What I'd dearly love:

A "Sequencer-Lite" for Legacy Animation Clips.

 

Here is an interesting experience to put things in perspective:
I spent the last 5 weeks learning Unreal and using its Sequencer to make a short.
The difference is so striking that, in contrast, Timeline seems to *actively* work against you. In so many ways, its workflow choices are the wrong ones.
So, like you, I conclude that the right approach to Timeline is to avoid it.

 

We've been using Timeline for a series of lightly-interactive webgl learning projects for over a year now and, stock standard, the Timeline was painful to work with. I've experience with a lot of temporal editing systems over the years in both audio/video and have done a lot of Flash work on console games using scaleform and gameswf and from the start was grating against the lack of common sequencing conventions in Unity's Timeline.

I've spent considerable time customising and adding in tools to speed up our workflow to do things like spline path movement, formation movement etc. I've also added a host of UI tweaks like being able to scale the tracks vertically so you don't have to scroll so much, being able to insert and remove time around the playhead (extending clips the playhead intersects with and pushing out the ones after it), scaling all or selected tracks and the underlying animation curves and so on. I'd love to add even more features but I run into a lot of internal class definitions that limit what I can do. Would kill to be able to filter tracks, embed sequences, better scene integration/interaction and more/better tooling around the binding system for when bindings are lost or you want to duplicate/copy an entire timeline sequence.

I'd also love to see the process of creating custom tracks and clips simplified - there's a lot of boiler plate and manual plumbing you have to do every time and a bit of a chore that could probably be automated a lot.

While I still wouldn't call our workflow amazing it's much better than it was when we started. As a small team of about 4 devs/artists we've produced many hours of content for clients in that time.

 

I’ve been using Timeline, Cinemachine and Recorder to do several pre-rendered videos with post work in After Effects and Premiere.