Pro CamSolve puts professional camera solving inside the Unreal Editor. Footage goes in, and a tracked CineCameraActor lands in Sequencer.
Every filmmaker compositing live footage with Unreal needs a solved camera. Today that usually means leaving the engine, solving in a separate application, and carrying the result back in. Plenty of filmmakers make that work, and they find good ways to do it. I want to make it unnecessary. Camera solving should live inside the editor, next to the shot it serves, for anyone who wants it there.
A feed-forward neural solve returns a camera and point cloud in a single pass, fast enough to run while the artist is still working the shot. It reads the whole scene as rigid geometry, so it needs a camera that travels through a scene that holds still. Its speed suits previs, blocking, and on-set iteration.
A COLMAP solve reconstructs the shot from the source frames using classical structure from motion, matching features across the sequence and refining the camera and the geometry together. Depth and distance constraints, a metric scale reference, and per-shot focal length recovery feed that solve, and masked movers are excluded from it. It is built for hero shots and final work.
This is past the design phase. The full pipeline runs today: footage ingest, SAM2 masking with prompt points, dual-solver execution, constraint system, point cloud review, and a one-click bake to a keyframed CineCameraActor in Sequencer.
A solved camera is the hinge between footage and everything built in the engine. These are the jobs it unlocks.
A location is shot practically and the world continues past the edge of the set. The solved camera holds the extension in place across the move, so the join stays put.
A creature, a vehicle, or a product needs to sit in footage that was shot handheld or on a dolly. The plate becomes a camera in the scene, and the element renders through it.
Scout footage becomes a working camera in minutes. A director can block a sequence against real geometry before the crew is called, and cut postvis against the plate the same day.
A phone walkthrough of a location returns a camera path and a point cloud. That cloud becomes the reference an artist builds the set against, at the right scale.
Music videos, spots, and social pieces run on schedules that do not accommodate a separate matchmove pass. Solving next to the shot keeps the work inside one session.
Students learn the concepts without a second application or a second license. The panel exposes constraints, scale, and focal length as things to reason about rather than settings to inherit.
Six principles drive the architecture. Each one removes a reason to leave the engine.
The panel, the solve, the review, and the bake live inside the Unreal Editor. A Python sidecar runs the heavy math out-of-process, so the editor never gets blocked.
Two engines, each built on a different approach. Static Solve is the quick pass for scenes that hold still. Precision Solve reconstructs the shot in detail and handles static or moving subjects. The same footage, constraints, and bake button serve both, and the artist picks the engine per shot.
SAM2 segmentation removes moving subjects before the solve runs, from prompt points the artist drops on the footage. Movers stop poisoning the track.
Depth hints, distance pairs, and a metric scale reference feed the solve directly, and the viewer shows them before you run it. Bad input gets corrected up front instead of cleaned up after.
Output is a keyframed CineCameraActor in Sequencer with correct scale, frame range, and focal length. Optionally, you may export an FBX through Sequencer for any other DCC.
Solvers and Unreal describe space differently, so a camera brought across can arrive mirrored or facing the wrong way. The conversion is handled in the plugin, and the baked camera matches the plate without hand correction.
These are the directions the tool grows after launch. The last two follow the research.
Exposing solve and bake parameters to Blueprints, and making solved takes available through Take Recorder, lets studios script the tool into their own workflows rather than driving it by hand.
The masking work inside Pro CamSolve is useful well beyond solving, and it already runs in 5.6. Pro Mask takes it out as its own plugin across the supported engine versions, built to work with Composure so masks generated in the editor can drive compositing directly.
A point cloud tells an artist where the world is, but nothing snaps to it. Turning the solved cloud into geometry gives set extensions a surface to sit on, shadows something to fall across, and CG a place to be positioned against rather than eyeballed. Precision Solve already produces the data this needs.
The same math that recovers a camera can recover the motion of a rigid object inside the frame. That covers the shots where something in the plate needs to carry CG rather than the camera.
A sequence is rarely one shot. Queuing a folder of takes to solve unattended turns an afternoon of supervised runs into an overnight job.
Static Solve reads a shot as rigid geometry, which is why it needs a scene that holds still. Feeding segmentation into the neural solve is the path to running it on shots with movers in them. This one follows the research, and the pace is set by what the open model landscape supports.
COLMAP can use CUDA for feature matching and dense reconstruction. A GPU-enabled path would cut Precision Solve runtimes on the RTX hardware most Unreal artists already own. Shipping it means solving CUDA build, licensing, and redistribution questions on a plugin that has to install cleanly for everyone.
The first download came in December 2024. Since then the DRKR PXLS Pro Cinematography Suite has logged 5,000+ downloads across two storefronts, and Pro CamSolve is the next tool to join it. Pro CamSolve joins a product line that already has paying customers and will keep growing.
This free composition toolset introduces filmmakers to the suite with in-viewport framing guides at zero cost. Downloads here become Pro buyers.
↗ Featured on 80 Level, December 2024
This is the professional framing toolset for cinematographers working in-engine, with composition guides, custom grids, and a shared suite toolbar. It has been maintained through three engine cycles with active buyer support.
This plugin applies industry-standard filmback presets and cinema & social crops in one click. The formats are spec-accurate and mapped to the cameras working DPs shoot, with a published reference chart.
My name is Akintayo Adewole. I trained as a mechanical engineer at Northwestern, then spent twenty years designing audio-visual systems for high-stakes rooms, including the UN's North Lawn Conference Building. I have spent fifteen years behind cameras and twenty composing and producing music.
Unreal Engine is where all of it converges. I'm currently Cinematographer / Technical Director at OVFX Animation Studios on an Unreal-built animated feature, an Unreal Authorized Instructor (Look Development), an Epic Games Animation Fellowship alum, and a Real-Time 3D mentor and course author at CG Spectrum, where I wrote the Virtual Camera Workflows specialization.
DRKR PXLS is the studio I founded in 2020, in part to build the tools I kept wishing existed on set. Pro CamSolve fills a gap I kept running into, so I went after it.
A tutorial series and documentation ship alongside the tool. Here is how I present and teach on camera today.
Matchmove without the matchmove department. Solo filmmakers and small studios get finals-capable camera solving for the price of a plugin. An entire paid external workflow stays inside Unreal.
A stronger case for Unreal as the hub. Every workflow that stays in-engine deepens Unreal's position at the center of virtual production, from previs through final pixel.
A teaching pipeline attached. As a CG Spectrum course author and mentor, I fold Pro CamSolve directly into curriculum. Learners come out the other side as working Unreal filmmakers.
A path to in-engine compositing. The SAM2 masking layer feeds Composure for holdouts, garbage mattes, and depth occlusion. The same layer seeds a future standalone matting tool in the suite.
Working prototype. The dual-solver pipeline, masking, constraints, and Sequencer bake are operational in UE 5.6.
Precision Solve hardening. Lens distortion is handled through the solve and the bake, compositing against the plate lands in the panel, and Precision Solve holds up across the benchmark footage set.
Multi-version builds. The 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9 packages go through the full QA matrix and Fab compliance review.
Fab launch. Pro CamSolve ships on Fab in Q1 2027 and joins the Pro Cinematography Suite, with documentation, a sample project, and a tutorial series live.
Pipeline integration and Pro Mask. Parameters open up to Blueprints and Take Recorder, and the masking layer ships as its own plugin.
Mesh reconstruction. The solved point cloud becomes geometry, so CG can be placed against a surface rather than a cloud.
Object tracking and batch solving. Rigid objects inside the frame get their own solve and bake path, and folders of takes can be queued to run unattended.