Play an Image Sequence in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.7 Documentation

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The Image Media Source asset provides a way for you play back Image Sequences inside Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) as part of the Media Framework tools. Image Media Source assets are similar to the File Media Source in that you specify a path to your Image Sequence files so it can play them back instead of linking to a video. Naming conventions are important and it's recommended that you follow a sequentially based system for your images; for example, Image_01, Image_02, Image_03, ensuring that they play back correctly in order.

In this how-to, we apply and use the Image Media Source to play an Image Sequence on a Static Mesh inside the Level.

The Electra Media Player does not currently support Image Sequence playback.

This tutorial covers manual workflows for image sequences. As of 5.1, you can also use the Media Plate Actor, which offers drag'n'drop addition of media sources and optimized streaming for pre-built meshes.

Steps

For this how-to we are using the Blueprint Third Person Template project with Starter Content enabled. You will also need an Image Sequence or if you do not have one, you can right-click and download the Sample Image Sequence used with this tutorial.

In the Content Browser expand the Sources Panel, then under Content, create a new folder called Movies.
Right-click on the Movies folder, then select Show in Explorer.

While not required, in order to package and deploy your media with your project correctly it is recommended you place it inside Content/Movies folder.
Place the images from your Image Sequence inside the Content/Movies folder.

In the image above, we have created a new folder within Content/Movies called UE5_Images and within it, placed our JPG images. We also created another folder called lowres that contains lower resolution versions of the images in our sequence. The Media Framework tools provide a way for you to work with (typically) lower resolution versions of your images through media source proxies during development. This is more efficient and will help minimize any performance issues when working with larger image sequences and file sizes.
Return to the Editor and click the Don't Import button on the Auto-Import dialog window inside your Unreal Engine 5 project.

There is no need to import the images into the project as we can point to where they are located within our project's directory.
Right-click in your Content/Movies folder and under Media, select Img Media Source and call it MyImageSequence.
Inside the new MyImageSequence asset, click the ... button next to Sequence Path and point it to the first image in your image sequence.
Click the Advanced Options rollout button to expand the Sequence options and under Proxy Override, enter lowres.

Here we are pointing to a folder called lowres containing our lower resolution images that we will use for development. Working with the lower resolution image files will reduce the memory requirements and provide a more optimized experience than working with the full resolution files.

The Proxy Override path must point to a folder of the same name, in the same directory structure as your full resolution images in order to locate it.
Right-click in the Content/Movies folder and under Media, select Media Player.

The Media Player asset is what we will use to play back our image sequence we have created.
In the Create Media Player window, enable the Video output Media Texture asset option, then click the OK button.

This will create and automatically assign a Media Texture asset that is associated with this Media Player that will be used for playing our image sequence.
Name the Media Player asset MyPlayer (which will automatically name the Media Texture) and double-click to open it.
Inside the Media Editor, in the Details panel, enable the Loop option.

Enabling this option will cause the Media Player to continually loop (playback) our image sequence.
Double-click on the MyImageSequence asset to start playing the image sequence.

Your image sequence will start to play inside the Media Editor and if you click on the Info tab, you will see information about the image sequence that is playing. In our example, we can see that the Dimension for our image sequence is 640 x 360 as we are currently set to use our lowres images.
In the Content Browser, open the MyImageSequence asset and clear out the Proxy Override section.

This enables us to switch to our full resolution images, where if we open the Media Player asset and play our image sequence again, the Dimension values are different.

The Image Cache progress bar at the bottom of the Player window reflects the amount of content cached in memory (green means fully ready and loaded, yellow is currently being loaded, gray means it's being scheduled for loading). Based on your system hardware, the amount of caching and colors displayed may vary. See the Image Media section of the Media Framework Overview for more information.
From the Main Editor, in the Place Actors panel in the Shapes tab, drag a Plane into the Level and resize and position as desired.

You can use the Transform Tools to move, rotate or scale the plane as you would like.
From the Content Browser, drag the MyPlayer_Video Media Texture asset on top of the Plane in the Level.

This will automatically create and apply a Material using the Media Texture to the Plane in the Level, which our image sequence will play back on.
From the Main Toolbar, click the Blueprints button then select Open Level Blueprint.

Before we can start testing, we will use Blueprint to tell our Media Player to open our Image Media Source asset at the start of gameplay so it can start playing.
In the MyBlueprint panel, create a variable called MediaPlayer of the Media Player Reference type and assign MyPlayer as the Media Player.

You may need to click Compile after creating your variable in order to assign the Default Value for the Media Player.
Hold Ctrl and drag the MediaPlayer variable into the graph, then right-click and create an Event Begin Play node.
Drag off the Media Player variable and use the Open Source node and set Media Source to MyImageSequence and connect as shown.
Compile and Save, then from the Main Editor click the Play button to play inside the editor.