Capturing a showreel in the engine

A screen recording of the editor viewport is the quickest way to make a video, and usually the worst-looking: dropped frames, flickering anti-aliasing and visible editor widgets. Every major tool has a proper capture path that renders frame by frame at a fixed rate. This page walks through Unreal Engine, Unity and Blender using their official documentation. For what to put in the reel, how long it should be and how to plan shots, read demo reels and flythroughs first.

#General principles

1. Animate the camera instead of flying it by hand. A keyframed camera gives the same move every time, so you can tweak lighting and re-render. See cameras, lenses and field of view.
2. Render a fixed frame rate. Frame-by-frame rendering means a heavy scene takes longer to render but never stutters in the result.
3. Render an image sequence, then encode. A crash on frame 900 costs you one frame, not the whole file, and you can re-encode for different sites without re-rendering. All three tools below can write image sequences (Unreal Engine Documentation: Render Settings and Formats; Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder).
4. Real-time and offline footage. Offline renderers can add features the real-time game would not have. Say in the caption whether footage is real-time. See real-time vs. offline rendering.

#Unreal Engine: Sequencer and the Movie Render Pipeline

The Movie Render Pipeline is "Unreal Engine's offline image sequence and movie rendering solution" (Unreal Engine Documentation: Movie Render Pipeline in Unreal Engine). It has three front ends (Unreal Engine Documentation: Movie Render Pipeline in Unreal Engine):

The usual workflow is: animate a camera in a Level Sequence in Sequencer, add the sequence as a job in Movie Render Queue, choose settings, render.

#Anti-aliasing and motion blur

Anti-aliasing in MRQ "controls the number of samples used to produce the final render" (Unreal Engine Documentation: Render Settings and Formats). Instead of relying on one real-time frame, it renders each frame several times (Unreal Engine Documentation: Cinematic Rendering Image Quality Settings):

• Spatial Sample Count renders each sample "multiple times, each time jittering the camera a little bit".
• Temporal Sample Count "determines how many time intervals each frame is divided into"; more temporal samples give "smoother, radial motion blur".
• Epic notes that "it is generally more efficient to put your samples into temporal sampling instead of spatial" (Unreal Engine Documentation: Cinematic Rendering Image Quality Settings).
• With 8 or more samples, Epic recommends Override Anti-Aliasing with the method set to None, which disables TAA (Unreal Engine Documentation: Cinematic Rendering Image Quality Settings).

#Warm-up frames

Temporal effects need a few frames of history before they look right, which is why MRQ has warm-up settings. Engine Warm Up Count runs the engine for a number of frames before rendering starts; Render Warm Up Frames also sends those frames to the GPU, and Render Warm Up Count sets the samples used "to build the temporal history before rendering begins" (Unreal Engine Documentation: Cinematic Rendering Image Quality Settings). Use Camera Cut for Warm Up takes the warm-up from the camera cut section before the start time, which means extending your Sequencer tracks before the first frame (Unreal Engine Documentation: Cinematic Rendering Image Quality Settings).

#Console variables, resolution and tiling

The Console Variables setting applies console commands when the render begins and reverts them afterwards (Unreal Engine Documentation: Render Settings and Formats). This is the safe place for quality settings you don't want to leave on in the editor. The Output setting holds the directory, file name, frame rate and output resolution (Unreal Engine Documentation: Render Settings and Formats). For images larger than the GPU can handle, High Resolution renders in tiles: a 7680 × 4320 output with a Tile Count of 2 is rendered as four 1920 × 1080 tiles, and an Overlap Ratio blends tile edges to hide seams at the cost of render time (Unreal Engine Documentation: Cinematic Rendering Image Quality Settings; Unreal Engine Documentation: Render Settings and Formats).

#Formats

For a portfolio reel, a PNG sequence is a simple, lossless choice. Use EXR only if you plan to grade the footage in a compositor.

#Unity: Recorder and Timeline

Unity's capture tool is the Recorder package, installed separately, which captures data "from your Unity project in Play mode" (Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder). It works only in the Editor during Play mode, not in builds (Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder). It can save gameplay or a cinematic "as a video file, as an animated GIF, or as a sequence of separate image files", plus multi-part EXR for compositing and WAV audio (Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder).

There are two ways to drive it (Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder):

• The Recorder window, where you set the duration and frame rate and can run several recorders at once.
• Timeline, where Recorder clips trigger "multiple independent recordings". If your camera move is a Timeline animation (or a Cinemachine camera on a Timeline), this keeps the recording and the animation in sync.

Movie Recorder settings (Unity Documentation: Movie Recorder properties):

• Formats: H.264 MP4, VP8 WebM or Apple ProRes QuickTime, plus GIF. H.264 MP4 is not supported on Linux; ProRes is not supported on Linux or Windows Arm64.
• Quality: Low, Medium, High or Custom for the Unity Media Encoder.
• Output Resolution: match the Game View, a preset such as FHD (1080p) or 4K (2160p), or a custom width and height.
• Frame rate: keep playback constant. The ProRes encoder does not support variable frame rate recording.

For smoother motion blur or path-traced frames, the Recorder can accumulate sub-frames (Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder). If you need a codec the Recorder doesn't offer, FFmpeg can be set up as a custom command-line encoder (Unity Documentation: Unity Recorder).

#Blender: render output

In Blender the camera move is ordinary keyframed animation, and the render settings live in Output Properties → Format (Blender Manual: Format):

• Resolution X/Y set the image size; % scales it for quick test renders with the same proportions.
• Frame Rate sets frames per second; Custom exposes FPS and Base, so you can enter fractional standards such as NTSC as FPS/Base.
• Aspect X/Y is for non-square pixels on old TVs; leave it at 1 : 1 for web video.

Set the frame range on the timeline, choose an image format in the output panel, and render the animation to a folder. Then encode the sequence in a video editor. Whichever render engine you use, say in the caption whether the result matches what a real-time engine would show.

#Further reading and watching

• demo reels and flythroughs and portfolios: what to put in the reel and how to present it.