The Sequencer & Cinematic Cameras

From the Cinematics button on the main toolbar, choose Add Level Sequence - Unreal creates a Level Sequence asset and opens the Sequencer panel at the bottom of the screen. A Level Sequence is a self-contained cinematic that lives in your project; you can have several (an exterior approach, an interior tour, a detail montage) and even nest them inside a Master Sequence to assemble a longer film from shots.

The panel itself is a timeline. Along the top is a time ruler measured in frames, with a playhead you drag to scrub; the whole scene updates live as you move it, because the Sequencer is driving the real engine, not a pre-baked preview. Down the left is a stack of tracks, and to the right each track's keyframes sit on the timeline. At the bottom you set the sequence's frame rate (24fps for a filmic look, 30 or 60 for smoother motion) and the playback range - the in and out points that bound your shot. Everything you animate - cameras, actors, lights, materials, even visibility - becomes a track here.

A few navigation habits make the Sequencer far less intimidating. The spacebar plays and pauses from the playhead; the left and right arrows step a single frame, which is how you check a cut or an ease precisely; and you can zoom the timeline with the mouse wheel to work frame-accurately on a fast beat or zoom out to see the whole film. The green and red brackets on the ruler are the playback range - drag them to trim the shot, because anything outside them is ignored on playback and, crucially, on the final render. Set the display rate early (24fps is the film standard and a safe default for archviz); changing it later re-times every keyframe, so decide up front rather than halfway through.

A track is the Sequencer's handle on one object or property. Drag a Cine Camera Actor into the Sequencer (or use the +Track button) and it appears as a track with sub-tracks for its Transform (location and rotation) and its camera settings - focal length, aperture, focus distance - each of which you can animate independently. Want the lens to slowly push from 35mm to 50mm across a shot? That is two keyframes on the focal-length sub-track.

You are not limited to cameras. Add a Light actor and animate its intensity or colour to move from day to dusk within a shot. Add a door (a mesh or Blueprint) and animate its rotation so it swings open on cue. Add a material parameter via a track to fade a finish from one option to another. Add a Visibility track to make furniture appear or a section of wall hide for a cutaway. Each track is one row, one thing you control; a rich architectural cinematic is just several tracks moving together on the same clock. Keeping them named and colour-grouped (the Sequencer supports folders) is the difference between a timeline you can edit next week and a tangle you cannot.

Organisation is not optional once a sequence grows past a handful of tracks. Group related tracks into folders (all the lights in one, the doors in another), give each Cine Camera a clear name rather than leaving it as CineCameraActor_3, and colour-tag tracks so you can read the timeline at a glance. This discipline is what lets you return to a cinematic a week later and still edit it confidently, and it matters for teamwork: a named, foldered Sequencer is legible to a colleague where a tangle of anonymous tracks is not. Remember too that a track only controls what you key on it - if you move a camera without dropping a keyframe (and without auto-key on) nothing is recorded, which is the single most common 'why is my animation not playing back' confusion for beginners.

A keyframe records a property's value at a specific frame. Set the playhead to frame 0, position the camera, and add a key; move the playhead to frame 120, move the camera, add another key - the Sequencer interpolates the camera smoothly between the two over those four seconds (at 30fps). That is the whole mechanic of animation: pin the important moments, let the engine fill the in-betweens. You add keys with the + key on a track, or enable auto-key so any change you make while the playhead is parked drops a key automatically.

The track that makes it a film rather than one long shot is the Camera Cut track. It does not animate anything - it decides which camera is live at each point on the timeline. Add a Camera Cut track, and for each segment pick a camera; at that moment the viewport (and the final render) looks through that camera. This is how you cut from a wide establishing shot to an interior to a detail: three Cine Cameras, each composed and optionally animated, sequenced one after another on the Camera Cut track. Scrub the playhead and you watch the edit play, cuts and all, live.

There is an important subtlety in how a Level Sequence relates to the live level. By default the Sequencer takes control of an actor only for the span it has keys on it, then hands control back - which is why a light you animated can snap to its level value after the shot unless you intend otherwise. Two more tools round out the workflow: the Camera Cut track has a pilot toggle that snaps the viewport to look through the live camera so you compose the cut exactly as it will render, and you can blend between two cameras where you want a soft dissolve rather than a hard cut, though for architecture a clean cut usually reads more confidently than a dissolve. Block the edit on the Camera Cut track first with rough timing, then refine each camera's own animation - blocking the cuts before polishing the moves is far faster than perfecting one shot at a time.

Raw keyframes with default interpolation often feel robotic - the camera starts and stops abruptly. The fix is easing. Between two keys the Sequencer draws an animation curve, editable in the Curve Editor. Change a key's interpolation from Linear (constant speed, mechanical) to Cubic / Auto (smooth) or hand-tune the tangents so the camera eases in (accelerates gently from rest) and eases out (decelerates to a soft stop). A move that eases in and out reads as a considered camera on a dolly; a linear move reads as a machine. For a hard hold, Constant interpolation keeps a value fixed until the next key.

Timing is the other half of feeling. Architecture wants to breathe: give an establishing shot four to six seconds so the eye can read the space, ease camera moves so they glide, and avoid whip-fast pans that induce motion unease (doubly important if the sequence will ever be viewed in VR). A useful rhythm is slow, deliberate moves punctuated by clean cuts - the pace of an architecture documentary, not an action trailer. Because the Sequencer is real-time, you iterate this by scrubbing and playing, adjusting a key or a curve, and watching the change instantly - the same tight feedback loop the whole course is built on.

The Curve Editor rewards a little fluency. Each keyframe carries tangents you can set to Auto (smooth), User (hand-shaped), Linear or Constant, and you can weight a tangent to make an ease more gradual or more abrupt - a long, gentle ease-out as a camera settles into its final framing is one of the most professional touches you can add. A useful diagnostic is to read the curve's slope: where it is steep the value changes fast, where it flattens the motion slows, so a good camera move usually shows an S-shaped curve - flat, steep, flat - rather than a straight diagonal. Keep the number of keys minimal; a move described by two or three well-eased keys almost always reads better than the same move littered with a dozen, which tends to wobble as the engine fights competing tangents.