CineShot Setup

🎬 CineShot Setup

CineShot Setup is a Unity editor tool for authoring camera moves

without keyframing. Position the Scene View, press Set Camera, and

shape the shot with sliders: orbit, crane, pan, dolly zoom, roll.

Every move you like becomes a key; the sliders reset to zero and the

next move continues from there. What normally means wrestling with

the Animation window, tangents and dolly tracks becomes a handful of

slider drags.

Everything happens in one dockable window (Tools > CineShot Setup):

author the shot, shape its timing on a key timeline, cut several

cameras into a trailer with transitions and music, bake the result to

a standard AnimationClip, and hand it to Unity's Recorder for an MP4.

✨ Key Features

🎥 Camera Setup

- Set Camera creates a CinemachineCamera at the current Scene-View

position

- Automatic look-at detection: pick a target from the detected list,

or hover the object directly in the Scene View and click it

- Pivot taken from the object's mesh bounds; LOD parts resolve to

their root object

- Decouple / Couple to free-fly and lock back

- Optional Scene-View overlays: game frame and camera path

- Every camera remembers its own moves

🎚️ Slider-Based Moves

- Orbit horizontal and Orbit vertical (°)

- Crane (m), Pan side, Pan up/down, Pan forward/backward (m)

- Zoom FOV (°) and Dolly Zoom (the vertigo effect)

- Roll, Yaw, Tilt (°) and Duration (s)

- Hold Shift while dragging for 10x finer steps (0.001 grid), Ctrl

for 10x faster travel

- Keep View holds the framing while the camera travels

- Sliders are relative tools: they move the live camera away from its

start pose, then + Add Key snapshots that pose

⏱️ Timeline & Timing

- Key bars proportional to their duration, drag to change length

- Ease per key, cycled with one click: Smooth → Linear → Slow → Fast

- Separate ease-in / ease-out phase lengths, draggable as flags right

in the key bar

- Key Reverse plays a key backwards, easing mirrored in time

- Per-channel mute via the eye icon, values stay intact and editable

- Shake/Noise per key: strength, speed, window (full length, start or

end) and length, with a Game-View preview

- Continuity linter flags keys whose start jumps, with a plain-language

fix hint

- Playhead scrubbing, Play All / Play Current, loop, Shift multi-select

🎞️ Sequence (Trailer)

- Chain any number of cameras into one trailer

- Drag camera keys sideways to reorder the shots

- Transitions: Cut, Linear, Ease In, Ease Out, Ease In-Out, Fade Black

- Transition duration by dragging, in 0.1 s steps

- Impact shake per transition, anchored at the cut or after the blend,

with preview

- Play the whole sequence in the editor, with loop

- Play selected Cam right next to Play Sequence, to compare one

camera against the full trailer

- Clicking a shot jumps the time slider to that camera's start

- Playback also works in Play Mode, so you can watch moves together

with particles and VFX that only simulate while the game runs

🔊 Audio

- Drop in a music clip and drag the waveform to shift it

- Plays along with Play and Play Sequence, scheduled and drift-locked

- Ends up in the recording if your Recorder preset captures audio

🎬 Bake & Record

- Bakes to a standard AnimationClip + AnimatorController

- Single camera, or a full multi-camera trailer baked onto a generated

trailer camera

- Selectable bake FPS and output folder

- Bake status light: red = not baked or the baked result was deleted,

yellow = changed since the bake, green = up to date

- Bake info shows the exact clip length and frame count, the number

the Recorder's end frame wants

- Open Recorder makes the camera you are about to record the live one,

hands over to Unity's Recorder window and uses your own settings

unchanged

💾 Data & Safety

- Stored per project in UserSettings/CineShotData.json, written

atomically with a backup copy

- Export / Import as JSON; import merges by GlobalObjectId, so shared

or backed-up moves land on the right cameras

- Undo support across camera, key and sequence edits

- While the window is open, Cinemachine's own camera frusta are hidden

in the Scene View so they do not fight CineShot's game frame; the

original gizmo settings are saved and restored when you close it

🎯 Intended For

- Solo developers and small teams making trailers, cutscenes and store

videos

- Level and environment artists presenting their scenes

- Asset Store publishers producing showcase footage

- Anyone who wants a camera move without opening the Animation window

Not intended for

- Gameplay camera logic or runtime camera control

- Character or object animation

- Replacing Cinemachine, CineShot builds on it

🔧 Render Pipeline Support

✅ Built-in Render Pipeline

✅ Universal Render Pipeline (URP)

✅ High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)

Depth-of-field auto-focus is carried over to the trailer camera on

HDRP only. Everything else behaves identically in all three pipelines.

ℹ️ Note

CineShot Setup requires Cinemachine 3. The Unity Recorder is optional:

without it the Record step is disabled and authoring, preview and

baking work normally. A demo scene with three ready-made camera moves and a finished

sequence is included, shipped once per render pipeline (HDRP, URP and

Built-in), so you can watch the whole workflow before building your

own.