Sequencer Editor

The Sequencer Editor is the main interface you can use to edit Level Sequences assets, in order to create cinematic content in Unreal Engine.

The following document provides an overview of the Sequencer Editor's user Interface, tools, and properties.

1. Toolbar

2. Outliner

3. Timeline

4. Playback Controls

Toolbar

The Sequencer Editor Toolbar contains a suite of tools, options and settings you can use to interface with Level Sequence assets.

Name	Icon	Description
World		Lists information on the current world context, Level Sequence Actor, and playback realm. It contains options for specifying whether you want your sequence to autobind to Play In Editor (PIE), Simulation, or other runtime sessions.
Save		Saves the current sequence and any subscenes or shots.
Find in Content Browser		Locates the current sequence's Level Sequence asset in the Content Browser.
Create Camera		Creates a new Cine Camera Actor. A new Camera Cut Track will also be created and will reference this camera if one had not already been created.
Render		Opens the Settings dialog, or the Movie Render Queue if its plugin is enabled.
Director Blueprint		Opens the Director Blueprint for this sequence, from which Event Track logic can be accessed.
Actions		Lists various sequence editor actions such as saving, import/export, baking, and selection editing.
View Options		Lists various sequence view options.
Playback Options		Lists various playback options such as playrate, start/end times, and playhead behavior.
Keyframe Options		Lists settings for Auto Key transform keyframing behavior, and what default tangents are created.
Auto Key		Enables Autokey mode, where keyframes are automatically created whenever a property or transform changes.
Edit Options		Lists settings for how edits from the Details panel are interpreted by Sequencer when using Auto Key.
Snapping		Enables snapping. The dropdown menu next to this lists options for setting snapping rules for keyframes, sections, and the timeline.
Frames Per Second		Lists settings for various Frames Per Second (FPS) targets at runtime. Also contains options to enable the runtime to lock to the chosen frame rate.
Curve Editor		Opens the Curve Editor which is used for fine tuning of animation keyframes and tangents.
Breadcrumbs		Displays the current sequence name, and is used to navigate master sequences and shots.
Lock		Locks the entire sequence to prevent editing.

Refer to Sequence Editor toolbar for more information about Sequencer's toolbar.

Outliner

The Sequencer Editor's Outliner contains a list of the Level Sequence asset's tracks, as well as tools to add, filter, and search for tracks. Tracks can represent Actors attached to your Level Sequence such as Cameras, Characters, Audio, and Effects.

Refer to Sequencer Tracks for more information about different types of tracks.

Timeline

The Sequencer's Timeline is a non-linear editing environment that represents the entire playable region of your Level Sequence asset. The Timeline includes horizontal regions for each Track, and can include assets, keyframes and timeline controls.

The playback range of your Level Sequence asset is contained within Start (Green) and End (Red) markers. The current location of your playback is indicated by the Playhead.

Navigation

To navigate your Level Sequence asset in the Sequencer Editor, you can pan and zoom within the timeline.

Panning

You can pan your Timeline view vertically, to see additional track regions, by dragging the right-side scrollbar up and down.

You can pan and zoom the Timeline view horizontally, to see different content in the playback, using the Range Slider at the bottom of the timeline.

Dragging the middle area of the slider pans, while dragging the left/right margins will zoom your view.

Holding the right mouse button and dragging along the timeline enables panning horizontally and vertically.

Scrolling will pan the timeline up and down, while holding Shift and scrolling the mouse wheel will pan the timeline left and right.

Zooming

You can zoom in the timeline by holding CTRL and scrolling the mouse wheel.

By holding ALT + Shift and clicking and dragging left and right with the Right Mouse Button, you can free-form zoom.

By holding CTRL and dragging along the time bar to the right, you can define a zoom region. Holding CTRL and dragging the time bar to the left resets the zoom back to full.

The zoom pivot is relative to the playhead by default and can be changed by locating the Zoom Position preference in the Level Sequence Editor section of the Editor Preferences.

If your zoom and timeline framing have overextended, you can reset your zoom and timeline framing by pressing the Home key, which also resets the bounds of the range slider.

Playhead

The playhead displays the current time in the sequence and is one of the main controls for timeline interactions. During playback it will move across the timeline at the specified playrate and can be stopped in place by pausing.

You can Left Mouse Button (LMB) drag the playhead to change the current time in the sequence, and preview changes in the viewport. This is commonly referred to as "scrubbing". See Scrubbing Responsiveness and Synchronous Scrubbing below for more information.

Middle Mouse Button (MMB) dragging causes the playhead to change to the selected position without causing the sequence to evaluate. This technique is used to change time, without changing property values and can be used to create same-value keyframes quickly. When manipulating the playhead in this way, it will change its color to yellow, to indicate the sequence is not evaluating.

The current time of the playhead is displayed and can be manipulated from the sequence outliner. You can press CTRL + T to focus selection to this field and type in a new time value.

You can also right-click the playhead or anywhere on the time bar to reveal additional options.

The Playhead time indicator can display with an asterisk (*) if the current time is on a sub-frame or in-between frame. This can happen if snapping is disabled.

Scrubbing Responsiveness

Seeking a specific location and scrubbing along a track in Sequencer are both asynchronous non-blocking operations, whose responsiveness depends on the video codec used. 

• Apple Pro Res provides the best scrubbing experience.

• H.264/5 is effective, but shows a few frames of lag even when you enable hardware decoding.

Media Player Info

For convenience, Media Sections display media player and media file information directly in the Sequencer UI. This provides visual confirmation of the media player in use for playback. 

Synchronous Scrubbing

For use-cases where you need perfect frame alignment while scrubbing, for example when animating in Sequencer against reference video footage, you can enable the Synchronous Scrubbing Sequencer media track option. It aligns the video and animation frames exactly where the playhead is located, which ensures perfect alignment at some editor scrubbing responsiveness cost. This option is disabled by default to favor speed and responsiveness. 

Selection Ranges

Selection ranges are custom regions you can define in a sequence to assist with timeline selection and playback.

To create a selection range, right- click a point in the timeline bar and set a Start and End Selection Range.

The selection range handles can be adjusted similarly to the start and end times of the sequence.

You can also set the playback of the sequence to loop within the section range.

Selection ranges can also be used to select keyframes and sections within them by clicking the Actions toolbar button and selecting Select Keys in Selection Range or Select Sections in Selection Range.

To remove a selection range, right-click the time bar and select Clear Selection Range.

Custom Frame Marks

Custom frame marks are points you can add to call attention to areas or provide annotation for your sequence.

To create a mark, right-click a point in the timeline bar and select Add Mark.

Frame Marks can be selected and multi-selected in the Sequencer Timeline in order to edit their location.

To edit a mark, right-click the mark flag in the Sequencer Timeline to access its context menu. Here you can customize its properties such as Frame Number, Label, and Color.

Use these properties to observe and set Custom Frame Mark behavior when creating cinematics in the Sequencer Editor:

Playback Controls

The playback controls can be found in the bottom-left corner of Sequencer and function similarly to standard media playback applications.

Buttons for toggling playing, pausing, and other playback-related functions are found here.

Icon	Description
	Records the motion of a selected actor in the Sequencer Outliner, using Take Recorder. In order to use this playback control, you must install the Take Recorder plugin. For more information, see the Take Recorder documentation.
	Sets the start time of the sequence to the current location of the playhead.
	Jumps to the start of the sequence.
	Jumps to the previous keyframe in the selected track.
	Jumps to the previous frame.
	Plays or pauses the sequence in reverse from the current position of the playhead.
	Plays or pauses the sequence from the position of the playhead.
	Jumps to the next frame.
	Jumps to the next keyframe in the selected track.
	Jumps to the end of the sequence.
	Sets the end time of the sequence to the current location of the playhead.
	Toggles between looping and no looping. Selection range looping is added if selection ranges are being used in the timeline.

Playback and Looping

Playback and looping performance are the most important functions of video playback. However, the Sequencer timeline makes a wide variety of Media Track section configurations possible, including native, cropped, extended, extended and cropped, with or without pre-roll and post-roll. These create edge-cases which cause problems for looping. The examples below are the currently-supported use cases for looping.

Baseline Looping

Baseline looping applies for use cases where:

• The Media Section length is unaltered, that is, it corresponds to the duration of the video clip.

• The Sequencer playback range fits within the Media Section pre-roll and post-roll bounds.

In this configuration, the video clip is at full length and located at T=0, which prevents using the pre-roll section. Since the red and green crop lines are located at clip edges, the Media Section implementation keeps the Player alive and can perform proper seamless looping when the playhead reaches the end of the Sequencer’s playback range.

To prevent user error and because it is difficult to precisely set the red crop line in Sequencer, we recommend you use special care in placing the red line or to use the Media Section post-roll feature to prevent the Player unallocating prematurely. 

Internal Clipped Looping

Internal clipped looping applies for use cases where you have done either of the following:

• Cropped a video in Sequencer by moving the green and red crop lines within the Media Section.

  • For example, placing the green line at frame 100 and red line at frame 700 while the Media Section has 1000 Frames.

• Manually cropped the Media Section by adjusting its start and end points inside the video clip’s duration.

  • For example, starting at frame 100 and ending at frame 700 if the Media Section had 1000 frames to begin with.

This use case is fully supported because the media player is properly notified of those new start and end frames, and can cache the correct frames accordingly.