Cutscene Groups contain Cutscene Tracks and they always have a target GameObject, called an Actor in Slate. There are two types of Groups:

The Director Group

The Director Group is the master group of a cutscene. There can only be one and can’t be removed from the cutscene. The Director Group’s target actor is always the Director Camera gameobject, which is the camera that is used for rendering all cutscenes. As a result, if a clip that is affecting an actor is added to the Director Group, it will affect the Director Camera. This allows you to animate component properties attached to the Director Camera, which could be useful if you wanted to animate an image effect for example.

The Director Camera is automatically created in the scene when it is required. You will notice in the image below, that the Director Camera also has a child named Render Camera, which is the actual camera. There can only ever be one Director Camera in the scene.

The Director Group is used to animate or do global stuff, such as camera shots, animating the ambient lighting, showing subtitles, creating objects, and so on. In the Director Group the following type of Tracks can be added:

• Camera Track to create camera shots.
• Action Track to perform global actions or animate global properties.
• Audio Track to play global audio like music or sound effects.
• Video Track to playback video files either on the background or on gameobjects.

Actor Groups

The Actor Group is the group with which you are able to affect a gameobject (the actor) in various ways. All tracks and clips added within this group will affect the same gameobject. The easiest way to create an Actor Group is simply to drag and drop a gameobject in the editor. In the Actor Group, the following type of Tracks can be added:

• Action Track to affect the actor in various ways or animate some of its component properties.
• Audio Track to play actor-centric audio like dialogue with optional subtitles.
• Animator Track to animate the actor with pre-made Animation Clips.

You are able to replace an actor if so required through the right-click context menu of an Actor group (or through the actor group inspector), as well as able to select the actor in the scene quickly by double-clicking the group.

Both Direct and Actor Groups may also be Disabled and/or Locked through their right-click context menu.

• A Disabled group will simply not do anything at all.
• A Locked group will make it impossible to make any changes to any of its clips until you unlock it.

Finally, Actor Groups can be re-ordered simply by clicking and dragging them, as so can Tracks within Groups. However, the Director Group itself can not be re-ordered and will rather stay at the top all the time. This is done by design so that it is always clearly visible and easily found.