Is the Cinematic Editor for Machinimas/Fan Movies dead?

Popcorn · February 2015

Hi,

I wasn't sure where to post this, since this contains questions regarding the technical support and fan creations, as well as simple curiosity regarding the current state of development and future plans.
That's why I post it into the general discussion. If this is the wrong place, please tell me.

I started to play around with the Cinematic Editor (my first attempt can be found here).
That little video took me hours to make. The editor crashed a thousand times on me.
Whenever I clicked "delete" to delete keyframes. Whenever I wanted to create a second camera.
Whenever I increased the size of my preview window bigger than estimated 1280x720. Somtimes it crashed just randomly.

I searched for older threads about this topic and noticed that there have been various attempts of other community members.
I also noticed that these threads are 1-4 years old by now and not too much has changed since then, it seems.

So my question is, are there any plans to improve the Cinematic Editor?
As of this moment there are way too many bugs to use it.
Placing and dragging a camera along the x-axis teleports it randomly to some other place on the map sometimes, for example.
I know these issues have been pointed out already. This is nothing new to some of you.
But has there even been some kind of development for this?

Is the Cinematic Editor dead? Will we ever see a proper fan made machinima/fan movie for NS2?
Am I years too late? Wouldn't it be a nice thing to get more people interested in the game?

Kouji_San · February 2015

that video was friggin' hilarious, good job. However I think the cinematic editor was never really stable at all, the trailers made by UWE we're a combination of cinematic editor and custom animations in 3D Studio 2009 I think. I would love to see it get up to the level of sophistication of the Source Filmmaker, but I'm not sure how much the CDT can do in terms of engine access or time they need for the game itself...

Popcorn · February 2015

Thanks. The reveal trailers were awesome. That must've been quite some work for them.
I've been watching some SFM videos and tutorials and there already are many similarities to the Cinematic Editor.
But I guess this answers my question then. It' seems it'd be a lot of work to fix and improve the CE and I suppose the CDT has enough work on their plates.
It might also be a lack of demand, as far as I can tell. Well then, it can't be helped I guess.

SamusDroid · February 2015

It's dead, and it's most likely going to stay dead for a long time. Eventually you learn what crashes it, what doesn't work, and all the things you can't do, and eventually find a way to work around them. Make sure you go into options and set auto backup to every minute so you don't lose anything.

Things that don't work:
You can't drag keys in the timeline without it creating another key. Instead you need to use the bigger timeline and move the nodes around. There you can set bezier or linear by right clicking on the node.

Trying to move something with precision by clicking alt and using the move tool will break the editor completely, breaking undo, and the ability to move anything around.

Rendering barely works, you are lucky if you can use it at all.
There's a huge list of other things that don't work that I can't think of off the top of my head.

The Exo reveal trailer was done in 3ds max and then simply played in the cinematic editor.

You can also use film mode with filmsmoothing command and r_gui 1 to create videos.

Popcorn · February 2015

Unfortunately working around all these problems gets tedious very quickly.
Yet I'm still motivated to try out a few more things.
I tried to recreate that "the good, the bad, the ugly" scene with three marines instead, but after 5 more crashes I gave up. At least for now.
I have absolutely no clue about 3ds max, so that will probably not work out for me :c

The "film" console command and "r_gui false" have been helping me out a lot on the other hand.
Those are working like a charm. It's just the lack of control over models, that makes me want to go back to the CE.

Thanks for replying. Now I know for sure.

BeigeAlert · February 2015

The cinematic editor is really only useful for making .cinematic files, not for animating and rendering.

It'd be great if it worked better, but I just can't imagine that being a very high priority at the moment.

Is the Cinematic Editor for Machinimas/Fan Movies dead?

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