Efficient Sequencer workflow tip in Unreal Engine 5

After chatting with a few of the member in the Starting Pixel virtual production group last night it became clear that there is an overlooked part of the sequencer that not many people know about.

We've all been there, working with dozens if not hundreds of meshes and having to keyframe them, change materials or visibility etc. It's a pain. However, you can save yourself a lot of time by understanding how tracks in the sequencer work.

A "track" inside the sequencer is a timeline segment which can be used for a number of varied things from organizing your timeline/sequence to exposing properties of that class/actor you have added to the timeline.

For static meshes you have some default tracks when you click the + button to the right of the actor name.

For custom blueprints you can expose a lot properties to the sequencer inside the variable properties section of the blueprint. Once enabled these will show up in the extended menu after clicking the + button. A good example of this is the Ultra Dynamic Sky blueprint. As you can see, it has dozens of custom and unique properties to edit inside the timeline.

But what if you have dozens or hundreds of meshes you want to edit in your sequence at the same time? In the image below i have about 18 static mesh cubes. And I want to change their material only for this sequence. What I've seen people do is manually go actor by actor and change the settings. Or manually move keyframes and line them up with others. It's a real pain.

Fortunately you only need to do it ONCE. I've added a static mesh component to Cube 1 and then added a material element switcher to it and chosen a black unlit material.

Then by selecting the child tracks of the cube and pressing Ctrl + C (Copy) I can then select all the other cubes.

Once I have all my static meshes inside the sequencer selected, by pressing Ctrl + V (Paste), we can see that we have pasted those child tracks from Cube 1 to all other static mesh actors!

The best part is, Copy and Paste also respects keyframes and timings. In the screenshot below you can see I have two keyframes on the X transform for Cube 1 moving it between one value at frame 0 and another at frame 123.

By selecting and copying the transform track and selecting all the other cube static mesh actors (on there top level!) we can paste the track onto them all and all keyframes and timings affect their parent actor.

You can see however that when pasting a track that already has the same track there it creates a secondary track. For this purpose since the original transform track is empty it should not cause conflicts but it is something to keep in mind for the future (and where good organization and naming come into play!).

A quick tip to save a lot of time and keep accuracy and consistency between actors when dealing with complex scenes!