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Movie Render Queue Export Problems

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  • updated
  • Fixed

Hi everyone,

we got notified from two different sources that there are problems with the file export created with the Movie Render Queue. One Problem is a very dark/black export file and the other that the cameras position changes on export. Both problems seem to happen only with Cinematographer cameras and not with the default ones.

This problem could possibly take us some time to figure out and fix so we created this thread to collect all information in one place, keep you updated and collect further instances of similar problems. We are looking into it and will let you know when we have new information to share.

Thank you for your patience!

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vadim karpenko

I'm the one who reported it on the marketplace page, and it seems like I've found a way how to resolve it. Click on your camera in Sequencer and click "Convert to Spawnable", a small lightning symbol should appear in the Outliner right next to your camera. Not sure why this happening, maybe because I'm using World partitioning and it somehow interferes.

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lumines_labs
  • Started

Thank you for letting us know that you found a solution! We will post your solution onto the Marketplace page as an anwser.

A short update for the other case, we can't reproduce black or dark exports but we can reproduce empty files when exporting to .exr. We are currently looking into it and try to find out why this is happening and how to fix it.

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lumines_labs

A short update from our end. We put a lot of effort into finding out why the .exr exports are empty but we couldn’t find any reason for it yet. We are still looking for a solution but can’t promise a fix, since we don't know where to problem originates.

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lumines_labs

While working on another issue we noticed that it is now possible to export to .exr without any issues. So it seems it was an Unreal engine bug all along.

In any case, .exr exports should work again with the newest Unreal version.

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mateus sá teles

Hi. I'm having the problem with images being generated too dark via Movie Render Queue. Currently running Cinematographer PRO 1.04 and Unreal Engine 5.0.3




The problem seems to happen inconsistently. Sometimes it happens for one output filetype but not others (In my example screenshot, all but PNG worked). Sometimes, all of them end up dark, but not fully black, even re-running the exact same shot with all the same settings.


I believe this might actually be two different issues: The dark (but not pitch black) images seem to be related to Auto Exposure not having time to run before the shot.

The pitch black images are probably something else entirely, but I don't know what.


If there's anything I can do to help diagnose, I'd be happy to do so.

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mateus sá teles

After some more bug-hunting by my colleagues, we concluded that the black PNG issue is actually that the image is exported with a blank alpha channel, causing the image to be invisible.   
This can be worked around by setting Samples Per Pixel to a value greater than 1, as the MRQ doesn't apply transparency for images with higher SPP values.  
Setting a higher SPP value also resulted in brighter images, even without changing exposure settings or scene lighting. 

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lumines_labs

Hey welcome aboard and thank you for getting in contact!

The Movie Render Queue seems to be in a pretty buggy state at the moment. We ourselves had several random problems occur and also got some reported by others, which just disappeared with the latest Unreal update. Especially different random results in brightness with the exact same setup. 


To exclude an auto exposure problem you could, if the brightness of the scene is homogenous enough, use auto exposure to set the exposure in the editor viewport and then disable auto exposure. This way, the current exposure settings are saved and will be used in the Movie Render Queue. Another option is to use several frames warm up before your actual render starts. You can find this option in the export settings if I recall correctly.

Sadly we currently can’t dig deeper into your described problems since we are in the process of moving offices and are still waiting for our gear to arrive. Hope this information helps anyways!