Day 72: Lining up Audio & Visual to Build Cutscenes in Unity

Objective: Get the audio to match the visuals.

When it comes to adding the audio tracks to Timeline, it’s the same as everything else. With Timeline open we will right click and add a Audio Track to Timeline.

After adding an Audio Track, Timeline will be asking for a Audio source. In our Hierarchy, we will create a Empty Audio Game Object to act as a parent and create two more Empty Game objects. One will be named music, this will be for the background music. The other one will be for the voice over, so this one is named ‘VO’ for voice over.

On both Music and VO we need to add a Audio Source Component. We wont add any audio clips to the component, Timeline will handle that part for us.

Back on Timeline we can add our VO to the Audio Track we created earlier. Once it is added, we will go to the track and right click and click Add From Audio Clip. We then need to align the audio to start at zero, this is done by clicking and holding the audio and slide it over.

Now comes the fun part. We need to align all the Cinemachine Shots to match the director notes and audio clips. Depending on how early your Unity is you may have to enter play mode to hear the audio. If you do you can adjust the camera shots and they will be saved. In Unity 2019.4, it seems you can play the Timeline and hear the audio so we don’t have to enter Play mode to adjust.

For this part it’s hard to show since you can’t hear with GIF’s. Like before, we read our directors notes to compose the correct Camera Angles and movements, we’ll do the same with the audio. Based on the dialogue should dictate which shot is playing. This takes some time lining every thing up.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day!