Day 59 — Blending camera shots using Timeline

Hey and welcome!

Got a nice short one for you here where I show you how to blend together two separate shots using Timeline in order for it to look seamless.

Currently when we’ve been switching between camera shots it’s been hard cut, I’m putting together an end of level cutscene where Darren makes his escape through the door, the first virtual camera is a full shot of the scenario like this:

Then the second virtual camera will finish with a close up shot of Darren reaching out for the door and looking towards the camera.

With the way we’ve been doing things before we would manually animate the cameras to pan in a particular way and the hard cut to a different angle. The plan here though is to get the camera to move in an organic way to blend the shots together.

Luckily there’s a very easy way to do that in Timeline that doesn’t require creating a separate animation track. If you haven’t already create a new Cinemachine Track in the Timeline and attach the main camera to it and then right click in the Timeline their to add in two Cinemachine shots where you can attach the camera to in the inspector and end up with something like this:

Now to get to blending, all you have to do is drag the Close Up shot over the Full Shot so that it shows it overlapping and then adjust the length of the Close Up shot so that it will still end when the animation ends.

That’s all it takes! The longer you blend together the shots the slower the animation between the shots will be. Adjust it to your liking and you should have something along the lines of this:

Pretty cool right? It has a very cinematic feel to it. If the shot you have looks a bit too mechanical for your tastes you can go into your virtual cameras and adjust the noise property. When you click on it you get the Basic Multi Channel Perlin option to click on which will then open up a bunch more options.

It’s best to have a play about with this property yourself, you can adjust the Amplitude and Frequency and even choose your own definition. Depending what you do you can get the shot to look more like a human is operating the camera or make it more machine-like depending on your preference.