Free camera-move and trailer authoring inside the Unity 6 editor. Requires Cinemachine 3.
Download the latest release and drop the .unitypackage into your
Unity 6 project. Nothing else in this repository is needed to use the tool.
Build a camera move with sliders, shape its timing on a key timeline, cut cameras into a sequence with transitions and impact shake, bake it to an AnimationClip, then hand it to Unity's Recorder for an MP4. No timeline wrangling, no keyframe fiddling.
Everything happens in one dockable window: Tools > CineShot Setup LITE.
Every feature of the full version: sliders, key timeline with ease control, per-key shake, sequence strip with transitions and impact shake, live Game-View preview, bake to AnimationClip, Recorder export, export and import, demo scenes. Nothing is watermarked or time-limited.
The only limits:
| LITE | Full | |
|---|---|---|
| Cameras you create with Set Camera | 2 | unlimited |
| Shots in a sequence | 2 | unlimited |
Two cameras and one cut are enough to learn the whole workflow end to end. The limit only counts cameras that already carry a camera move, so existing Cinemachine cameras in your scene never block the button. The full version is coming to the Unity Asset Store.
| Unity | 6.0 LTS (6000.0) or newer, one build for all of Unity 6 |
| Cinemachine | 3.x, required (com.unity.cinemachine) |
| Unity Recorder | optional, only for the MP4 export (com.unity.recorder) |
| Render pipeline | Built-in, URP and HDRP, a demo scene ships for each |
| uGUI | com.unity.ugui, used for the Fade-to-Black overlay (ships with every Unity template) |
A material can only reference one shader, so a single scene cannot serve all three pipelines. The demo therefore ships three times, as
HDRP/,URP/andBuilt-In/, with identical layout, camera moves and sequence. Open the one matching your project and delete the other two folders.
Cinemachine 3 is a hard dependency: the tool drives CinemachineCamera components and will not
run without it. The Unity Recorder is not required. Without it the Record step is disabled and
everything else (authoring, preview, baking) works normally.
- Download
CineShotSetupLITE.unitypackagefrom the latest release and import it viaAssets > Import Package > Custom Package…. - Open
Tools > CineShot Setup LITE. - Optional, for recording: install Unity Recorder via
Window > Package Manager > Unity Registry > Recorder, then configure one Movie recorder inWindow > General > Recorder. CineShot never changes those settings, it only opens the window.
You may rename or move the folder anywhere under Assets/, but keep it together: the Editor
folder must keep its .uxml and .uss next to the assembly.
- Press Set Camera to create a Cinemachine camera at the current Scene-View position. The tool then offers look-at targets: pick one from the list, or hover the object directly in the Scene View (it highlights green) and click it. The pivot comes from the object's mesh bounds.
- Move the camera with the CONTROLS sliders (orbit, crane, pan, dolly zoom, roll and so on). The sliders are relative tools: they move the live camera away from its start pose, and the Game View follows along live.
- Press + Add Key to snapshot that pose as a key. The sliders reset to zero, so the next move starts from the pose you just captured.
- Repeat. Shape timing in the TIMELINE card: drag key bars to change duration, click the ease buttons (Smooth, Linear, Slow, Fast), drag the ease flags, mute channels via the eye icon, add Shake/Noise per key.
- Step 1: Bake writes an AnimationClip + Animator and activates the trailer camera. The status light next to the button turns green when the bake is up to date (red = not baked yet, yellow = changed since the last bake). It drops back to red if you later delete the "CineShot Trailer Camera" or the generated clip, because there would be nothing left to record.
- Step 2: Open Recorder opens Unity's Recorder window and makes the camera you are about to record the live one: for a trailer it switches the "CineShot Trailer Camera" on, for a single camera it switches a leftover trailer camera off so it cannot outrank yours. Enter the frame count shown under the button as the end frame and record your MP4.
For a two-camera trailer: select both cameras, press + Add selected cameras in the SEQUENCE
card, then click the green + between the two camera keys to insert a transition (Linear /
Ease In / Ease Out / Ease In-Out / Fade Black). Drag a transition key sideways to set its duration;
drag a camera key sideways to reorder the shots; Del removes the selected key; Delete All
clears the sequence in one undoable step.
CineShot Setup - Tutorial (PDF): 15 pages, from the first camera to the recorded trailer. Eight annotated workflow steps, plus reference pages that explain every card, slider, checkbox and button. Written for the full version, but the LITE edition has the same window and the same controls, only the two limits above differ.
One demo per render pipeline, pick the folder that matches your project:
| Pipeline | Scene | Data file |
|---|---|---|
| HDRP | HDRP/Scenes/DemoScene |
HDRP/Scenes/DemoScene_CineShotData.json |
| URP | URP/Scenes/DemoScene |
URP/Scenes/DemoScene_CineShotData.json |
| Built-in | Built-In/Scenes/DemoScene |
Built-In/Scenes/DemoScene_CineShotData.json |
All three are identical in layout, camera moves and sequence. Only materials, sky and lighting differ. The other two folders can be deleted; their materials cannot resolve their shader in your pipeline and would show up pink.
Open the scene, then in the tool window click Data > Import… and pick the matching
DemoScene_CineShotData.json. That loads two ready-made camera moves (a 120 degree orbit with a
slight crane, then a dolly push with a tele zoom) and a finished two-shot sequence joined by an
Ease-In blend. Press Play Sequence to watch it, or click either DemoCam_* in the Hierarchy to
inspect its keys.
Both demo cameras already carry a move, so the LITE camera limit is reached inside the demo scene. That is intentional: the demo is there to be watched and taken apart. In a scene of your own you start at zero and can create two cameras of your own.
Authored keys, sequences, the music selection and the output folder are stored per project in:
<ProjectRoot>/UserSettings/CineShotData.json
UserSettings/ is a Unity convention for per-machine settings and is normally excluded from
version control. That means:
- Camera moves are not shared with teammates through git/Perforce by default.
- To share or back them up, use Data > Export…, or commit
CineShotData.jsondeliberately. - Cameras are referenced by
GlobalObjectId, which includes the scene GUID. Duplicating a scene or turning a camera into a prefab creates a new id, and the tool treats it as a new camera.
Baked artifacts (AnimationClips, Controllers) go to the folder shown in the Output row, by
default Assets/CineShot Setup LITE/Animations. Recorded videos go wherever your Recorder preset
points.
"The LITE version lets you author camera moves on up to 2 cameras." You already have two cameras with moves on them. Delete the keys of one of them, work in another scene, or move up to the full version. Cameras without any CineShot move do not count.
The Record step is greyed out. The Unity Recorder package is missing. Hover the button, the tooltip says so.
I pressed Open Recorder and got a warning first. The bake status light was red or yellow: red means nothing has been baked yet, yellow means you changed something since the last bake. Bake again, then record.
The status light went red although I baked. The result of that bake is gone: either the "CineShot Trailer Camera" was deleted from the Hierarchy, or the generated clip was removed from the Animations folder. Undo the deletion and the light goes back to green by itself, otherwise bake again.
Nothing was recorded, or I sat in Play Mode doing nothing.
Recording is driven entirely by Unity's Recorder window, not by CineShot. Open
Window > General > Recorder, make sure exactly one recorder is enabled and valid, set a start and
end frame, and press Record there.
I change a camera's Field of View and nothing happens. FOV is a driven value here. The baked Trailer Camera's FOV is controlled by its Animator, and the Main Camera's FOV is controlled by the CinemachineBrain, so both are outputs and a manual edit is overwritten every frame. To change the FOV, use the Zoom FOV slider in the CONTROLS card (negative = zoom in) and bake, or set it on the source camera's Lens before baking. The demo scene's second shot has a -6 degree Zoom FOV, which is why its baked FOV reads as roughly 56 rather than 60.
"CinemachineFocusDistanceCompute.compute not found".
HDRP auto-focus needs Cinemachine's HDRP sample. Import it via
Package Manager > Cinemachine > Samples. Without it, everything except auto-focus works.
The window is empty.
The .uxml and .uss must stay inside the Editor folder next to the assembly. If they were
moved apart, the window says so in the console.
Shake preview only shows in the Game View. The preview shakes the camera itself; the Scene View watches that camera from the outside, so the wobble is only visible through the camera, that is, in the Game View.
A camera key in the sequence strip is grey.
Its camera lives in a scene that is not loaded, or has no keys. Grey shots are skipped during
playback and baking. Click it and press Del to remove it.
Cinemachine's camera frusta disappeared from my Scene View. That is CineShot, on purpose: while the window is open it hides Cinemachine's own frusta so they do not fight the calm game frame it draws instead. The original gizmo settings are saved and put back when you close the window.
- One LookAt target per camera timeline (switch targets by cutting to a second camera).
Fade Blackis currently the only overlay FX transition.
The editor assembly ships precompiled (CineShot.Editor.dll). This is a free edition of a
commercial tool, not an open-source project. The runtime components and the Recorder bridge ship as
source so they integrate cleanly with your own scenes and build setup.
Free for personal and commercial projects, see LICENSE.md. Redistribution or resale of the tool itself is not permitted. Anything you create with it is entirely yours.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome, please open an issue. Include your Unity version, render pipeline, Cinemachine version, and whether the Unity Recorder is installed.