Using Timeline to line up Audio and Visuals in Unity

When creating a cutscene, it is important to have the audio and visuals in sync. If they are not it can break player emersion and make your game feel cheap. Unity has made syncing up audio and visuals simple inside the timeline window.

The first thing that you can do is add your virtual cameras to the timeline and animate them to get the shots that you want.

One tip in working with timeline is that you can create track groups. This will allow you to put all your virtual cameras into one group. This is useful because you will be able to collapse the group to create room in the editor.

Now that you have the virtual cameras in place and in your track group you will add the audio source. Do this by selecting an audio track from the drop-down menu at the top of the timeline window.

You can create an empty game object to place as the audio source. You can then drag the audio into the timeline window.

To line the audio up with visuals is largely dependent on what the director wants. The audio source has sound wave indicators that allow you to visualize where the characters are talking. Playing the animation through the timeline window will allow you to hear the audio. This will allow you to adjust the virtual camera lengths to get the shots you want.

Another great tool is the animation window. When you adjust the length of the virtual cameras you will mess with the start and end times of the animations you made. The animation window will allow you to select the keyframes and adjust them to fit the new length of the shots.

These tools will allow you to sync your audio and visuals to stunning cutscenes.