Rendering out movies in Unreal Engine is somewhat counterintuitive. We can render movies using the Render to Video in Sequencer which gives us the rudimentary options. But we will miss on ability to queue longer renders with this plus we can’t use anti-aliasing. Welcome Movie Render Queue plugin.

You need to enable Movie Render Plugin in Plugins in order to access the settings. IF you need Additional Render passes, make sure you enable also the Movie Render Queue Additional Render Passes plugin.

It is also now possible to render out Prores with Movie Render Queue by enabling. Apple Prores Media plugin. If you intend to use Prores 422 HQ for example, enable this plugin.

Having the plugins installed, you can then access the Movie Render Queue from the Window > Cinematics menu.

Opening the window will give you a clean slate that is a bit confusing.

Clicking the green + Render button will enable us to add any level sequences to it. Then each of the level sequences will have their own settings we can customize, or choose existing preset.

Here I have opened the Setting dialog of the default preset and added .EXR output instead of the default 8-bit .jpg. It is surprising that these .EXR files are 16-bit instead of 32-bit that the standard Sequencer outputs, I should wonder why this is so. We can also change output to Prores or Render method. We can render out path traced animations for example.

What’s great about this is that we have access to Anti-aliasing options here. What I have found that works decently well is having some Spatial Sample Count like 8 or 16 while also adding Temporal Sample Count. Spatial Sample Count increases quality of each frames and Temporal Sample Count helps motion blur, reducing glittering pixels especially on shiny surfaces. I am still experimenting of what would work best for quality while keeping the render time decent enough here.

Lastly we can save the presets. If we want to save each of the sequence outputs to point to a different folder for example we can also do it here.

Definitely use Movie Render Queue if you can, it can save a lot of time and give you a higher quality animations.

See the official documentation of the feature over here.