Unity Development — Lining Audio and Visuals in Timeline

To make a full cinematic experience, there must be both audio and visuals to complete the scene. In Unity’s Timeline, you can add audio and cinema tracks together. Once you learn the tricks to properly line them up, you’ll be making cutscenes, or even full films, in no time.

If you have your assets ready, you can make an empty game object in your scene and add a Playable Director. This is made easier if you have the Timeline window open and hit the ‘Create’ button while your new object is highlighted.

Under that new object, you should be placing anything you’ll need for the clip you are attempting to make. This includes virtual cameras, UI, animations, and for our focus today, audio sources. If you have more than one audio source for the cutscene you are making (possibly music and SFX), then you should make another empty game object to hold these audio sources.

In Timeline, you can now use Audio Tracks to line them up with visuals. Once again, if you have more than one, you can make a group.

While this was not true in earlier versions of Timeline and Unity, you can now hear the audio tracks in the preview. This now makes the whole process much easier.

Click and drag the cinema tracks in accordance with what you hear and when and you’ll have an easier time lining up all your sounds and music with those visuals.